Why UX Is So Important in eCommerce
At Fusionary, our expertise lies in crafting tailored solutions that elevate your customer’s user experience — otherwise known as UX. Not only do we believe deeply in the power of our user experience design services, we’ve also seen how our UX framework effectively informs the development of high performing ecommerce websites that boost our clients’ revenue.
We understand how the digital user experience process we work on with our clients can feel tedious, or even obvious. After all, visual mockups are more fun than UX deliverables. However, we’ve also learned, with nearly 30 years of experience as a firm and project leads that have 100+ years of combined experience, that the UI/UX consulting part of our process cannot be skipped. The materials that come out of it are foundationally important to meeting our clients’ goals. If we were to skip it, we’d be making blind decisions that would slow a project down, making it potentially more costly and less successful in the process.
Read on to learn why UX is one of the most important components of any ecommerce project we take on for our clients.
Applying UX in eCommerce
No matter what we’re building, we want to understand the project goals, business goals, user goals, and how best to get a client’s intended messages across. In general, the mindset is the same, but the steps along the way can vary, and there are different conventions we will follow differently depending on what type of thing we’re building together.
Nevertheless, there are a few UX particularities that are worth calling out.
First, we consider a client’s customer base. If a client is talking to an extremely narrow group of people, it’s easier to figure out their needs and to talk about and to them. Compare this to a project that involves 6–7 user segments, then personas within those segments. The depth and breadth of UX artifacts we create varies quite a bit depending on the customer and what their needs are.
Next, ecommerce is a strong capability of ours here at Fusionary, and designing a user experience for ecommerce comes with its own host of questions. With ecommerce in particular, no matter how large the site and how many SKUs you have listed, you want to reduce friction. The call to action [CTA] is almost always to get a user to put something in their cart and complete a purchase as smoothly as possible. The types of questions that we ask range from has a user purchased from us before, to what is their simplest path to purchase, to how we should list content and categorize products so that they’re as intuitive to browse and purchase as possible. The trick is to give people options to get to the products they want while still keeping it simple.
Content as a Core Competency
One of the things that makes Fusionary different is how deep we get on the content side. Part of our process with an ecommerce site is to marry how a client thinks about their products with the way their customers think about their products, then determine how to display it all on a public-facing site so that it makes sense to everybody. But we don’t stop there. We also help our clients think about how to connect the way the website CMS pulls data out of whatever tool they’re using for backend inventory purposes to the site itself.
Furthermore, most other agencies use lorem ipsum filler text when they’re presenting mockups. Unfortunately, this can cause things to fall apart when clients try to map their real content to this new design. At Fusionary, our approach to information architecture [IA] and wire framing is based on the content that actually exists and what our clients are going to create and/or get rid of in the launch process. We help our clients think about their content and their messaging hierarchy: What are users looking for that you don’t have? What messaging are you hoping to get out there that you aren’t right now? Often, we take what exists, pull it apart, and put it back together in a way that gets the message across more clearly and gets rid of some of the fluff.
Our favorite part of every project is when our clients see our mockups complete with real content, which pulls everything we’ve been working on together visually — that’s the lightbulb moment.
Omnichannel approach: An eCommerce UX Trend
It used to be really expensive to take an integrated omnichannel approach to the whole customer journey, to, say, make the experience seamless for customers shopping in-person and online. Many of our clients still think that these tools are outside of their budget, and that they’re only accessible for really big companies. It’s exciting to be able to share the progress being made to sync technologies together. It can be easy and doable to manage content across myriad platforms for clients of any size. This is a huge area for growth that’s directly connected to our UX work and is something that we hope to collaborate with more of our clients on.
UX Consulting Services for eCommerce Projects
A massive benefit to the UX discovery process is how well we understand our clients and their business goals. It means we get to skip most of those steps when our clients come back to us looking for how to represent product extensions, add a slew of new SKUs to their ecommerce site, reach new customer segments, or further optimize based on the data and A/B testing they’ve been conducting since launching a site. In this way, we’re able to act as established partners, and as knowledgeable, efficient, and effective UX consultants for our return ecommerce clients.
Let’s Talk
For Fusionary, it will always be about the customer. Service has been our mainstay: We are committed to enabling your success and delivering quality work. With our many years of experience, we know what works (and what doesn’t!) and are ready to lead your project to success. Learn more about how we can improve your ecommerce experience by contacting our leadership team today.