An effective customer journey is essential in optimizing key KPIs like conversion rate, bounce rate, AOV, and CLV on your site. In order to launch a site to optimize your KPI numbers, your technical requirements and actions must be planned out and executed with precision to ensure that the user is guided from “just browsing” to a completed conversion. Your site’s functionality and features should accrue paying customers with little to no difficulty or inconsistency. When it comes to the development side, good practice encourages us to monitor for broken links, reduce page load time, and integrate widgets to make conversion a breeze. But what about UX design?

Technical aside, at DotcomWeavers, our design team believes that design is just as important as development. After all, you’re bound to spend hours writing code and managing the product catalog through the backend, why not use design to seal the deal elevating your business to its highest conversion rate ever? Our designers say there are several non – negotiables when it comes to forging a successful eCommerce site that goes beyond the typical color wheel and photoshop.
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Here are 3 UX Design Details You Can’t Afford to Miss:

According to our expert designers:
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1. The Design Should Resonate with the Brand Identity and Product Positioning

How do you want your shoppers to feel? This applies to both brick and mortar stores as well as online stores. Your vision for both should be aligned and you should prioritize creating a seamless shopping experience between the two. If the concept of your store is clean, uncomplicated and airy, a cluttered, over embellished site will confuse your buyers by muddying your overall business values and creating an inhibited customer journey. Focus on identifying elements that will remain consistent across your stores so customers can associate with them and be guided more efficiently. Colors, fonts, image style, and product presentation are just a few things to think about when it comes to maintaining a consistent website atmosphere. Be mindful of image placement, content updates, and page navigation along the path to purchase. Does your content encourage interaction? Is the customer left looking for more?
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2. All Text Should be Legible and Comprehensible

Visitors to your site often have certain goals when happening upon your store. Overcomplicating the search and find process with too much text, too little text, or blurry visuals will surely cause a bounce from your site to another more visually appealing and well organized competitor site. Apply good contrast and supply accessibility tools to maintain ADA compliance throughout all textual elements throughout your store. Attempt to strike the right balance between concise and descriptive while ensuring that text size, color, and font are cohesive and easy on the eyes. Line spacing, text alignment, and letter size are essential to putting your best foot forward on the pages of your online store and other elements such as alt text on images and image optimization will build SEO value and help with SERPs. Be sure to utilize text styles and placements that will easily translate to various screen sizes and web browsers.
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3. Streamline Checkout Process

Lengthy, misleading checkout processes are a huge conversion deterrent. Simplify your checkout process by reducing steps, and removing any unnecessary distractions to the user. Employ clear CTAs and minimize form fields. Look to design a checkout and payment process that offers multiple payment options, a guest checkout option, and keeps the customers on your page as opposed to designing a structure that directs users to another website to complete their purchases. As designers, your skill set is naturally more advanced than the average user, and this can often get in the way. For example, as tempting as it is to design a one step checkout with a trendy circular button around the CTA, most users are conditioned to expect a standard 3 to 5 step checkout with a rectangular CTA button. Keep it simple and do not try to reinvent the wheel.
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Consistency is Key

While these may seem like simple fixes, our designers emphasized the need to truly immerse yourself in the project to produce consistent results. This will ensure you are delivering the most effective UX designs as possible. To do this, it is essential to think in the shoes of the user without assumption. Because of the habitual expectations and pre-formed mental models that users possess, it may not always be wise to completely change certain traditional elements in hope of attracting more interest. In fact, playing into typical user habits and expectations, can have a positive effect on traffic, conversion rate, and the retention of customers on your site as they will associate your site with ease of use, familiarity.

The result? A high performing site that drives eCommerce revenue.
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Challenges that Yield Rewards

When asked for the most challenging part of their work, our design team highlighted the pressure to please everyone. Our designers talked about the decisions that are made behind a design, noting that extensive sacrifices must be made to deliver a design that accommodates users from all walks of life. Finding the sweet spot, all things considered, is pretty challenging. A design team must study and learn their audience, which can often be the hardest part.

Throughout the past 14 years our experienced designers have been involved in over 400 projects and when we sat down to ask them what is most gratifying about their work, they agreed that the most rewarding part of their work is when a site is launched and users on the live site are actually enjoying the experience of something you designed yourself. Praise for ease of use, the visual treatment of the site, or the overall success the site brings to each client respectively is meaningful and fuels their passion for the next project.

To view the robust and effective UX designs created by our innovative design team at DotcomWeavers, view our portfolio here.