You get the to supermarket this weekend for your ‘weekly’ shop. The beans aren’t where they should be, the bottom shelf is too low and the top too high, the frozen peas are under the ice cream and cheese choices, well, they’re just all over the place. But you persevere and find your items. Now the checkout girl is slow, and finding your way back to the car is a whole other story! This was your experience of a physical store and shopping online can have the same frustrations.
Online or in store you want your experience and time shopping to be pleasant and hassle free – get in, get what you need and get back out, back on to enjoying your day!
Supermarkets get this – that’s why they spend time and money making sure that when you go, you can navigate, find the items you want (with some upsell) and provide you with a quick and easy, pay and leave process.
In this day and age you expect nothing less from your local store. With this generation shopping online holds the same expectations. You may think the comparison between super markets and online shopping is a different ballgame – but think about it, the homepage is the shop front and products are still the products, and the checkout process is the checkout staff. It’s all under the big bubble of user experience or UX.
Only now – the user can shop online on so many different way, giant screens, multiple screens, pc’s, mac’s, laptops, tablets, phones and now watches! Then after that there is multiple browsers to ‘adhere’ to! Making the user experience online is now more important and as difficult then ever. Technology is always changing, more and more consumers choose to buy online over physical stores everyday – not to mention that Google is now also putting more emphasis on UX in their algorithm, if your site is hard to use – Google can and will drop you down the ranks.
Understanding this is key, sketching your ideas first, user testing and putting your self in the consumers seat – is this easy to use? Can this design and style be navigated to help the user buy? Does the look or feel convince the user that this site can be trusted?
I must mention here that talking about design and UX is not just something looking pretty, good aesthetics does not mean good UX, design can often be confused as with decoration, but its about responding to problems, a great blog by Steve Fisher of Yellow Pencil explains this really well – read more about it here.
Keeping a close eye on your data and analytics can be a good indication on how your UX is preforming, identifying any what is working and what failing – Users getting to the checkout quickly, means the process is smooth and easy, if users are dropping off at the product page, something must be wrong at this stage. Data and user testing paired together is essential!
The importance of user experience with in web design and development can not be overlooked in any instance – it could be the difference between a successful business and a failed attempt.
USER EXPERIENCE – it’s what it says on the tin.