5 POINTS TO THINK ABOUT WHEN DESIGNING YOUR WEB STORE

Design to Guide and Tell, not to Guess...

It is very common to enter online stores which have a great looking homepage, nice photography and graphics. However, a fair number of homepages fail to describe what is exactly the store about, what it has to offer, and/or indicate the visitor where to click to access to whatever he/she is interested in. Most of the times visitors would try to confirm if they have landed on the correct store by clicking in the "About us", or drilling down to the Catalog pages. Yes! Good! you got your visitor to browse your catalog!... This should be something to be happy about, right? ... Well, not really.

While it's not bad at all to get your visitors browse your catalog, the reason why they are doing it, is not the correct one. They are somehow struggling to find out where they have landed with huge chances to click the back button multiple times to get to the search engine results page again. Right from the start the user experience is somehow affected by uncertainty. Homepages, or any sort of landing page should explain to the visitor why did he/she landed there, what are the offerings that the visitor should be interested in, and next steps. Your visitor needs guidelines to understand where he/she landed. Go straight to the point, be straight forward, don't have your visitors guess where to click, they don't like it.

During a visitor's experience on any given online store, there are a number of selections to be made, and with that come all the different questions and concerns to be addressed by the merchant. A product page is a critical page where questions come up. Your designer should work on figuring out what are the buyers' potential questions, so the answers can be added to the information on the product page. Here is a good example of a product page that includes almost all information that any buyer could ask, and it's all in ONE page (nice job!): Overstock Product Page. In this example, once the potential buyer is in that product page, he/she can check product's images, descriptions, pricing, availability, specs, reviews, Q&A, shipping info, payment methods, and warranty info... this should be enough info right? Most certainly, but if it's not enough, there is even a live chat service available to answer more questions!

Analyze old design before building a new one

It is true that once you are a regular shopper of any given store, one of the reasons why you became loyal to that store is because you find relatively easy what you are looking for. Customers become used to how the store is structured, how it flows, and knowing where relevant information is located. Even the site colors are something that customers get used to. And if the customer is loyal enough he/she will compare or judge other sites based on the first one. This is called the Baby-Duck-Syndrome, which describes the tendency to stick with the first design they learn and judge other designs by their similarity to that first design.

Users' previous experiences on your site are something that a designer should really consider before coming up with the greatest site design of all time... because it might simply not work. Web analytics is something that could be used to track the customers' behavior within your site. Take your time to study and understand what is it that these guys are doing while on your store. You will discover behavior patterns of existing customers, showing you how they get to the product they are looking for, and basically showing you what are the things in your site that don't need to change. Sometimes a few enhancements, will do much better that an entire site re-design (conversion wise).

Flexibility: Think ahead

Not every time things go as planned. Designers tend to think that the visitor will do things right from the first time, but as you well know from self experience, that is not always the case. We regularly end up in un-wanted pages or opening un-wanted applications, and when that happens, we don't like it, and we will try to find our way out of there. Sometimes we do have mechanisms (buttons, hyperlinks) that will assist us, guiding us to get our way out of there, but some other times we might end up clicking the Back button.

When the second scenario happens it means that the site is not designed for flexibility. Flexibility in design is not only reflected on ways to escape to un-wanted pages or apps. It can also happen that the visitor clicks on a "wanted" page, but once in it information is not enough or, when enough, now the visitor wants to learn about something else related to that first topic. In that case the designer should add buttons and links that would expand the information related to that topic, without making the visitor go back to previous pages.

Design for appropriate audiences

Defining your site audience involves doing a research of the demographics, psycho graphics, and topographics related to your audience behavior when making a business decision. There are multiple types of visitors to your online store, each different one from another, with different social economic levels, inserted in different social environments in different places in the world, using different languages (even vocabulary within the same location) and different levels of education.

Your designer can build a web site taking into account only the general audience (ie, 75%), but you will probably end up missing conversions from the rest. The best way to get the attention of the 100% of your visitors is to group them into Personas. Persona, as defined in the "American Heritage Dictionary" is "The role that one assumes or displays in public or society; one's public image or personality, as distinguished from the inner self.". Segmenting your audience into personas will help you distinguish the different decision-making processes each one is used to, and the preferences for obtaining an agreement and closure. Once your designer understands this, he/she can design based on each one of your visitors.

Minimalism: Stick to basics

You and your designer are already aware that you should base your web site's designs on whatever improves customer experience. That's nothing new... however, if you want your web site to succeed you need to understand that customer experience is a discipline. The fact that it is a discipline and should be treated as such, I consider it is something that too many web designers out there don't seem to fully understand. I have browsed many web sites that tend to ignore how I feel for the benefit of displaying the "coolest" animation or the "latest" application on the market, which confuses me, makes me exercise my brain to guess where to click, and I end up loosing valuable time.

Visitors land in your site with an objective in mind and they want to execute it as easiest as possible. Ignore the latest fad, just do the basic things your visitors wants. I am not saying don't use rich media, but use it wisely. Don't let rich media become an obstacle for your visitors but rather use it as a guide tool to help the customer to convert.