Your ecommerce site exists for one purpose and one purpose only—facilitating purchases. Incorporating these ecommerce user interface best practices will optimize the experience your shoppers have, helping them accomplish that goal.
Fast Loading Time
Studies have shown 40 percent of users will give a site no more than three seconds to load before moving on to another one. None of the other advice in this article will matter if your site makes people wait too long. To avoid this, minimize code, compress images and employ responsive design so your site looks good regardless of the device a shopper uses to access it. By the way, Google rewards sites with fast load times by ranking them more highly.
Intuitive Navigation
Employ short, logical paths to your products. Keep category names simple. This isn’t the time to take off on flights of fancy with esoteric category names that make a shopper have to stop and think. You don’t want people to think, you want them to act. Search bars should be logically placed (typically in the upper right hand corner of a page). Supplement the magnifying glass icon with a window labeled “Search” and render it in a contrasting color to ensure it’s easy to locate.
Vivid Call to Action Buttons
You want CTAs to pop off the screen compared to other content on a page. If you’re working with a pre-existing ecommerce theme, they will probably already adhere to this standard. If you aren’t, customize your buttons to make them as attractive as possible and color them either green or blue—both of which have been found to encourage purchase behavior. Every landing page, product page and supplemental information page should have a call to action button.
Let Pictures Tell the Story
High quality product images go a long way toward helping a customer decide to make a purchase. Always run a large establishing photograph of the merchandise on product pages. Thumbnails, upon which a user can click to get alternate enlarged views, should support these images.
Ensure Legibility of Text
Product descriptions and all other copy on the site should be at least 12 points for body copy and 18 to 20 for headers. Use simple, easy to decipher fonts like Calibri, Cambria or Arial. Leave white space between lines to provide contrast. Make sure your copy is legible on mobile devices.
Simplified Product Page Layouts
All essential information (price, brief description, color and size options, as well as links to reviews) should reside “above the fold” so users don’t have to scroll to find it. Sure, they will scroll if they have to, but why make them? Reviews, testimonials and other information can reside below the fold.
Leave Breadcrumbs
The concept of breadcrumbs in web design ensures customers can go back readily to get reoriented if they get buried in a submenu. This makes it easy to move between landing pages, product pages and info pages. It has the added advantage of enabling search engines to crawl and index your site more quickly. Progress bars are a useful variation on the concept to tell users how far along they are in a process such as filling out forms to provide shipping, billing and payment information.
Easy Checkout Process
Let customers make purchases without registering. You can always ask them to do so after they’ve made their buy. Let users review items without navigating away from the checkout page. Keep the steps required to complete a transaction minimal. Provide a wide variety of payment options and incorporate simplified buying with services like PayPal and ApplePay.
Again, the sole purpose of your ecommerce site is to make it as easy as possible for people to buy what you’re selling. These ecommerce user interface best practices will help you accomplish just that.
