As ecommerce has evolved, today’s savvy users have come to expect interactive, transparent, and powerful online experiences. Ignoring best practices in ecommerce design can lose you sales and impact on your bottom line. The challenge for ebusinesses is identifying precisely where the online opportunities are and how to capitalise on them.

The 2.0 era represents a major shift in focus from performance design to persuasion design and from user-centred design to success-centred design. This evolution requires a systemic approach – one that incorporates business goals, marketing, and usability elements of the user experience.

To achieve mutually successful ecommerce outcomes, the user experience needs to be considered from five unique dimensions:

• Effort
• Usability
• Power
• Persuasion
• Brand

Effort and Usability – browsing, searching, finding, understanding, interacting

An effortless experience is fundamental to successful site design. An online experience that requires too much effort will drive your customers away to your competitors’ sites. Key elements of a usable ecommerce site include effective navigation, uncluttered page designs that direct users’ attention, and clear starting points and pathways.

Effective navigation is 80% of usability. Users should be able to see where to go and how to get there. Relevant product categorisation, clear labels and good visual design are critical to building meaningful navigation.

Most of us have experienced ecommerce pages that are visually overwhelming and difficult to use. Cluttering triggers include excess shading and patterned backgrounds. An uncluttered layout, on the other hand, means your site can control customers’ eye movements, direct their attention on the page, and increase their chances of performing tasks successfully.

Applying basic page layout and design principles will make your site easy to use. For example, group related items together with design and layout, use a clear and consistent grid structure for your pages, and be specific about what task the user is to accomplish.

Power - meaningful content and interactions

Simply providing a usable experience will not guarantee ecommerce success. Users will only be drawn to your site if it offers them product, content, or features that help them to know, do, or obtain something meaningful to them. A site’s ability to satisfy a user’s desire is the essence of the user experience dimension of power.

This dimension is now even more significant. Today’s online social connectivity empowers communities within an ecommerce site by virtue of user-generated content. Discussion forums and user ratings can help drive sales by giving users greater power over their purchasing decisions.

Traditionally, ecommerce products have been grouped and navigated by hierarchical product categories. An increasingly common navigation feature of web 2.0 interactions is faceted navigation. This enables users to narrow product results down by whatever characteristics (or facets) are meaningful to them at the particular time.

One aspect an ecommerce site will never be able to replicate, though, is the tactile buying experience in a bricks and mortar setting. Rich media that enables interaction is going some way to making the two-dimensional, online experience more real. The web-based ‘Mini Car Configurator’, for example, lets buyers configure and view their car with optional extras online, something they cannot do in the physical marketplace.

Persuasion – responding to calls to action

The clear objective of an ecommerce site is to sell, which means converting a visit to a sale. Customers, though, may be looking for information or comparison, not necessarily to buy. Successful persuasion models are those that empower the user by supporting his or her goals.

Persuasion, however, has to be balanced. Trying to sell too much at the wrong time will stop customers from buying, whereas not trying hard enough to sell will result in poor conversion.

Persuasion architecture must also guide users through the entire purchasing process with features, timely opportunities and clear calls to action aimed at offering them something relevant. Successful cross-selling and up-selling strategies depend on understanding your users and testing the effectiveness of your persuasion architecture to avoid creating psychological chokepoints.

Brand – building an online brand

A brand experience is the contact a customer has with a brand. With the growth in the online sector, it is crucial that your ecommerce site provides a positive experience that reinforces your brand. A site’s personality, that is, its look, feel and tone, reinforces the brand. Moreover, where you already have a bricks and mortar brand, users will expect there to be a discernible relationship with the look and feel of your site.

Creating a consistent brand experience is not the only way an online and a physical presence can enhance the brand. The two can be connected so that customers use one as a tool to research what they are looking for at home, but go into a shop to try an actual item on. This offers customers greater power over the purchasing process, as well as enabling them to move at will between the physical and virtual world.

To be successful, an ecommerce site needs to balance the dynamics of user experience goals of power and effortlessness with the business goals of conversion and brand recognition. Balancing these objectives will help you create online experiences that your customers will want to come back for again and again.

 
 

Nigel Grace is the Managing Director for Human Factors International’s operations in Europe.

Human Factors International (HFI) is a global organisation specialising in usability and user-experience design. It helps clients drive their businesses forward by creating websites and software applications that are engaging and intuitive. For more information, visit www.humanfactors.com/Europe