How to improve my e-commerce store?
It's a question we get asked quite often, and one we'd like to answer (partially) below. The quickest answer would be: it depends.
Now, here's a more elaborate answer.
Let's assume the goal is to increase sales. In this case, there are several ways to do it:
- generate more traffic to the e-commerce store,
- generate better qualified traffic,
- capture more prospect data,
- improve conversion to first purchase,
- increase the product mix in the shopping cart (or, in other words, make customers buy more products each time they visit the store),
- improve the overall user experience (UX) to achieve better conversion,
- more satisfaction and more recurring users,
- understand what the user is looking for to incorporate new products into the offering, etc.
The above tactics relate to different aspects of the same objective: generating more business. In one way or another, designing user-centric e-commerce services is a complex process where
usability plays a fundamental role.
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At FREED, we have analyzed many sites in detail over the last year and a half (we have a methodology and a guideline, nothing escapes us), in addition to the transactional websites and e-commerce stores that each of us has previously managed in different countries, from Canada to Latin America and Europe. That's why we want to share the most common mistakes and how to avoid them when facing the Analysis and planning stage.
Here we will discuss errors related to the steps prior to interface design, interaction design, or the development of the e-commerce store itself, and which do affect results. Can something that doesn't yet exist "be born" with usability errors? Of course. These errors can be avoided in the initial stage or each time an analysis is performed to optimize the results of an existing e-commerce store.
Go to the homepage -> Click on a banner -> Go to the promotion landing page -> Continue browsing other products -> Add something to the cart -> Pay.
Does this seem like a very common (simplified) navigation pattern? Surely, but it's one pattern among many others.
It would be a mistake to think that all users search for information and, consequently, navigate in the same way.
- Understand information seeking behavior patterns. In general, from human factors to neurosciences or human/computer interaction, this type of learning requires knowledge from different areas.
- Consider regional or local variables. What might make a Latin American have different expectations than a North American or European, for example, since both have some common references but others are very different.
- Investigate the needs of the target customer, which determines their decision-making and how their experience is from browsing to purchase and after-sales: for this, research work is required where tools such as user archetypes, customer journey or service blueprint will be very useful. Empathizing with the customer and their context of use also means understanding the changes related to the exponential increase in the use of mobile devices and omnichannel.
In English, the books:
Shorter articles but in Spanish: Interaction design patterns and Search anti-patterns in apps, on the UXLumen blog.
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Quit – Abandon the search. Perhaps the simplest but most unfortunate pattern: the user doesn't find what they were looking for and leaves.
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Narrow – Refine the search, or go from the generic to the specific.
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Expand – Expanding the search is the opposite of refining. If the user doesn't find what they're looking for, they will "flexibilize" their criteria in search of something more general.
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Pearl Growing – "Pearl growing" is a common pattern for expert users in general and refers to in-depth searching based on an initial result. If you've ever looked for something seemingly simple and ended up browsing for 2 hours reading a lot of related topics, you were "growing pearls."
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Pogosticking – This is a common term in organic positioning (SEO) that refers to successively abandoning several results that do not meet the search criteria / are not what the user expected. It is an anti-pattern. We can also visualize it as jumping from one search result to another.
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Thrashing – Hyper-pagination is another anti-pattern. An example would be trying to search for a concept, not finding anything conclusive, and continuing to search with small variations of the same concept instead of completely changing the search approach.
2. Thinking that all users arrive / will arrive via the homepage
Once we understand that users don't necessarily arrive via a site's homepage, we can do two things: (1) avoid getting caught up in power struggles between different departments within the company – everyone wants to be on the homepage, at least with… a banner – and (2) truly focus on optimizing the entire site, both at the individual page level and systematically.
For an existing e-commerce store with metrics:
For new projects, simply resetting assumptions about how people navigate and broadening the range of navigation scenarios is a good start.
Wrong. Clearly having a search engine (that works well) is an important functionality for a complex site like an e-commerce store usually is. However, thinking that the search engine will solve all problems for all users is a mistake.
How to solve it
For an existing e-commerce site, as in point #2, analyzing metrics, expert usability evaluation, and user testing are good clues to identify usability and UX breaking points, and to define priorities for creating a continuous improvement or redesign work plan.
In both new e-commerce store design projects and redesigns, two other interesting lines of work:
- Understand what information architecture is and empower yourself with it.
- Adopt simplicity as a business concept and practice, even beyond design. The first step to stop building corporate portals that function like true dinosaurs (due to their age and size) is to take the path of simplicity.
Being lean or agile is one thing, improvising is another. At some point,
it's important to professionalize, either by training (if you are an independent professional setting up an e-commerce store // if you take on a high-responsibility position such as head, deputy manager, or e-commerce manager), in addition to forming a specialized internal and external team, with experience and dedicated to developing and optimizing e-commerce.
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