UX Recommendations to Improve Conversion
Poor eCommerce user experience continues to be a top main reason businesses are failing to hit their digital growth goals. From drops in conversions, increasing bounce rates or cart abandonment, and overall low sales, a poor UX can do major damage. Echidna's user experience (UX) team has provided actionable insights and recommendations to remedy these issues and more for our clients. By leveraging data and applying best practice user experience and usability principles, you can start to identify key pain points and areas of opportunity.
Watch as several Echidna clients discuss our approach to user experience for eCommerce and keep reading for tips on improving conversion below.
The following are general recommendations that have worked for many of our clients, but won’t always be applicable to all sites. If you are curious about a UX Site Audit led by Echidna’s User Experience team with prioritized insights and recommendations that can be smoothly transitioned into your roadmap and implementation plan, please contact us.
1. Addressing Current Situations
Our current unique circumstances mean changes to the business. Addressing that upfront with your site visitors and how your brand is taking action is not only transparent but builds future trust.
71% of respondents agreed that if “they perceive that a brand is putting profit over people, then they will lose trust in that brand forever”
- Edelman
Consider putting a geo-targeted header or pop-up to link to additional information on how your company is addressing this unprecedented time. This could be shipping delays, BOPIS contactless options, or changes in your communication styles.
Echidna client Orscheln Farm and Home displays a banner linking to additional information regarding COVID-19 commitments.
2. Consistent Visual Design
Look over your site regarding CTAs (calls to action), links, icons, and visual elements. Are they consistent? A visual design system improves the consistency and usability of the site. This ensures that page elements are not visually chunked and have a consistent color or font hierarchy. This also improves usability, readability, and task completion for customers.
Echidna client Frontpoint Security offers a consistent visual design throughout their entire site.
3. Page Performance
A slow page performance can hurt not only those visiting your site's ability to engage and convert but also Google’s ability to give you a strong search rating. One quick hit tip is to minify code to improve page load and transition speed.
4. Site Search
A search that returns accurate results is one of the most critical factors in any eCommerce site. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most overlooked. Consider implementing a smart search and guided navigation feature to create a more efficient and scalable search management within the shopping experience.
5. Clean Mobile Experience
The mobile experience is just as important as the desktop user experience in 2020. A poor mobile experience can critically damage your ability to be found on Google and also your conversion rates on mobile.
Several ways to ensure you have a clean mobile experience include:
- Ensure all elements and content are readable in the mobile view.
- Make sure the brand logo and search are embedded into the global navigation.
- Ensure a visual hierarchy to the menu system - deciphering shopping categories from services, assuring customers can easily understand the information architecture of the mobile experience.
6. Uncomplicate Your Checkout
Having the most simple and streamlined checkout possible is key to closing the deal. With holiday around the corner we are sharing top comments that have come from our client user groups when discussing simplifying the checkout process:
- Minimize distractions, such as attempting to upsell beyond the cart or adding extraneous navigation and links.
Removing unnecessary links and information in the checkout has been shown to improve checkout conversion by up to 15%.
- Offer a live chat option so customers can ping you versus picking up the phone to call in if they have an issue during checkout.
- Allow autofill for addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers.
- Use clear and obvious error messaging, located in the context of the relevant form/function.
- Offer a guest checkout option.
- Single page checkout is king- try to simplify down before the holiday if possible.
