Nikka Estefani
Category: Design Talks
Every year, entrepreneurs evaluate their business operations to see what works for them and what doesn’t. As you can imagine, these business operations are often complex: marketing, sales, finances, operations, human resources; among other factors.
If you are running an online store – either as your primary way of selling your products or secondary means – it is important to take care of your online store or eCommerce website as well. There are technical aspects you must consider when maintaining your online store – hosting, data usage, plugins, etc. But one factor that is often disregarded (unfortunately) by many entrepreneurs is their website’s UX/UI.
At worst, the website is literally a visual dump: oversized fonts, colors that don’t match together, pop-ups that blocks your screen every 5 minutes, and that very, very big “BUY NOW!” button that screams like, “Yes, we look like a scam!” Of course, if your website has a lousy design, not only it’s bad for the eyes, to begin with, your website will look fishy – it looks like a big scam – therefore, your potential customers will naturally gravitate away from it.
At best, however, the website owner will give his/her artistic imagination to the website: colorful fonts, overloaded animation, and yes, that big pop-up unfortunately won’t just go away.
Look, there is nothing wrong with using your artistic imagination. But it’s just important to consider key factors when designing your website. This is especially true because you are not just running a website; you are actually running a store.
It is important you know how to maximize your design (namely, your site’s UX/UI) not just for its aesthetics, but to increase your store’s sales as well!
Since you are wrapping up your business for 2020’s challenges and surprises, take these top 5 UI design trends your eCommerce website will need this 2020.
1) Emphasize on Usability
It is important to say this again and again: usability is just as important as design. A lot of websites have a superb design, but when it comes to its usability, you know you’re lost. If you can’t even find the site’s “About Us”, or worse, for eCommerce stores, if it’s hard to find their Cart Button, you know something must be fixed about its usability.
Usability is important because, at the end of the day, your visitors – potential customers – don’t visit your site to see how awesome your design is. Your website is a store, and your visitors would (probably) want to buy. So make it easier for them to buy in your store.
For a clue, these are the important pages your customers should immediately see (or be able to easily find):
- About Us
- FAQ
- Cart Button
- Contact Form
- Chat Bot (it’s best you have one)
If you sell multiple products, it should be easy for your customers to navigate your products through different categories. Don’t get them lost on product listings!
2) Emphasize on Responsiveness
Responsiveness is almost always connected to the usability (and even the visual design itself) because if you don’t have a responsive website, your buttons may mess up around, making it hard for your customers to navigate your website.
A simple rule of responsiveness is this: if your banner or logo gets cut when you switch to a smaller device like a tablet or mobile device, then you need to work on your responsiveness. Why? Because it is not just the banner that’s getting compromise, your icons – which is more important – also gets compromised in the process. You must then take care of your responsiveness as much as you take care of your usability.
3) Add Chat Bots
Chatbots make it easier and convenient for your customers to contact you in case they need anything from you. Now, you may be thinking, why isn’t an email address or contact number enough to contact you? And hey, there’s the Contact Form! Well, there’s two reasons for that:
- It’s simply inconvenient to contact you through email or your business’ telephone/mobile number
- A chatbot gives your customers the impression that you will respond faster (even though you might be offline)
If you have no 24/7 chat support team and can’t be available 24/7, simply let your customers know in the chatbot what time of the day will you be online. You can also add an automated message for frequently asked questions.
4) Minimize the Pop-Ups
You may think that pop-ups help in increasing your leads. However, and let’s be honest, most of the time, pop-ups annoy us more than it makes us give away our email address.
It’s not that pop-ups are bad; you just need to minimize it. And by minimizing, we don’t mean minimize the size. This can mean, for example, reducing the amount of pop-up per session or over a certain time period.
5) Use Psychology to Your Advantage
Since you are a store, you must remember that your number one goal is to make sales. It is for this reason that understanding sound UI/UX principles is important – not just for your site’s design, but to create a design that’s appealing to your customers and make them buy your products.
For more about psychology, we have a full article here: 10 Psychology Principles Web Designers Must Know
Conclusion
If you will observe, the principles stated above can be applied to virtually all websites. However, these are all the more important if you’re running a website with the intention to make a profit.
Start 2020 with a blast by following these 5 design trends for your eCommerce website!
Check out our other articles!
