Advanced UX: Getting Serious About User Experience

So here you are, the dedicated eCommerce operator, and after having invested a great deal of time into designing your online store, you notice that it still doesn’t look quite right. You can’t put your finger on it – after all, you designed a website that any consumer would want to visit, one that is open and honest and friendly, and still demonstrates to the customer why they should buy your products. If it feels like you have the general concepts of design down, but would like to get into the specifics, it may be time for some discussion about advanced user experience.

Psychology and User Experience Design
are by nature highly intertwined fields.

-Catriona Cornett

User experience experts know that connecting with your audience improves conversions. But one of the most difficult things about maintaining a storefront in the world of eCommerce is that the internet, by its nature, is an ever changing beast. After all, the world of the internet fifteen, ten, even five years ago is very different than the world of the internet today – not only because of drastically increased modem speeds, which allow websites to be designed with a lot more information, but also because common computer requirements like monitors have become bigger and better, allowing the clever eCommerce merchant to design a much more vibrant storefront than was previously possible. In order to keep conversions high, but costs low, eCommerce operators need to design compelling websites that don’t need to be updated often, striving for a sense of timelessness that can be easily adapted.

Towards that end, in this article we’re going to discuss:

• Simplicity
• Sliders (and Fly Out menus)
• Search

Simplicity:

As monitors have grown over the years, one of the things many website designers have overlooked is the switch from 4:3 and 5:4 aspect ratios to the more film-like 16:9 (those of you who understand fractions may be wondering how 4:3 is different from 16:9). The fact is, more than fifty percent of home computer owners have upgraded their monitors to wide-screen, a fact that an eCommerce website could use to eliminate one of the most common annoyances of the internet age – the scroll bar. While in many cases a scroll bar may be unavoidable (one of the major instances of this are in articles, or anything with a long list of comments), but if your goal is to get your storefront right up in front of the customer, designing for a rectangle instead of a square – and therefore avoiding the pillarbox look – can help make sure that nothing is hidden off page from the customer. And as we’ve discussed before, customers love the ability to take in as much information as possible at a glance.

Sliders (and Fly Out menus):

That being said, there is a constant war between presenting as much information as possible, and avoiding the clutter that comes when your website has more information than can be displayed on one page. Using fly out sidebars to replace the pillars that once dominated the sides of your website can allow you to present broad categories that slowly become more and more specific, allowing the customer to find exactly what they’re looking for, without losing that link to your main page. Sliders work in a similar fashion, allowing you to display a great deal of enticing information without having to cram the main page with pictures and details, especially when that space is better used making the page easier to navigate, instead of cluttered, since negative space is just as an important consideration of design as what you fill the pages with.

Search:

However, you can’t put everything into a slider or a fly out menu, or rather, you shouldn’t. An eternal list of drop down and fly out menus can become annoying in a completely different way than clutter, so there is a point of diminishing returns for your categories, before you just have to let them navigate to a new page. But there will always be a segment of consumers who know exactly what they want, and are only interested in checking your prices and comparing your deals against your competitors. For this sort of customer (whom it is every bit as important to keep happy as the browsers, maybe more so), your website needs the internet equivalent of an index – the search bar. Thankfully, you have many options for adding a search bar, all of which allow you to maintain website simplicity, without sacrificing product variety.

As you can see, despite the constant threat of Moore’s Law and it’s effects on computers, there are some ways you can adjust your website in order to remain timeless. Even if the technical aspects of these ideas change, a website that stays simple, avoids clutter, and allows people to search it will never go out of style, at least in its skeletal form. So get out there, and keep the people happy, so they keep coming back!