When you go shopping at the mall, you are determined to find the products you need as quickly as possible in each store. Have you ever found women's clothing on two different floors of a store? Have you had a chance to look for essential dairy products in several places in the supermarket? Have you had to go from store to store to look for a range of candles in order to compare the products on offer?
These situations have certainly made you feel negative - so you can understand that if a user of your online store, mobile app or shopping platform encounters these kinds of problems, they will feel similarly discouraged. And it's much easier to abandon a shopping cart during even a big purchase than to walk out of a stationary store you had to come to. How to minimize the appearance of such situations? A UX audit can help you with that! Read on and discover why you need it in your eCommerce.
One of the most important goals - website usability
Again - when you're looking for a product you need in one of the mall's stationary stores, you're sure to place a very high value on quality. High quality also matters for websites that will be considered useful to a customer when they feature great ergonomics, useful functionalities, and content that appeals to a customer. Another important factors for eCommerce customer are short page load time, intuitive navigation and low difficulty of searching for necessary information. Synergy of all these elements leads to customer satisfaction due to the fact that it allows to find the right product quickly, and then proceed to purchase or perform other conversions.
How to make sure everything is working "right"? Conduct a UX audit, then eliminate the bugs and watch how things change in your eCommerce!
UX audit - to help eCommerce owners
Who should take care of the best possible store user experience? You - as the owner of eCommerce in cooperation with developers and specialists in UX and UI design. In this task, you can be supported by a UX audit of your online store outsourced to an external company. The audit involves the analysis and evaluation of a website or mobile application in terms of adapting to the expectations, requirements, and needs of users. Such a procedure aims to increase usability by eliminating elements discouraging from using the website.
UX audit allows you to get to know the strengths and weaknesses of your website, as well as indicates potential development paths, within which it will be possible to improve the level of eCommerce user experience. Implementing the suggested changes in your e-store will help you increase your business results.
When to conduct an eCommerce UX audit?
You may think that such research is useful only at the time of setting up an online store, to check usability within each step of the shopping process, but this is not true. At any moment it may happen (especially if you make changes or perform updates) that some element of the website loses its proper functioning, ceases to be attractive for the recipient, or brings negative results in terms of usability. Constant monitoring of eCommerce results will allow you to react quickly to potential problems.
Some of the situations that should trigger your attention and cause you to take concrete steps (such as ordering a store audit) include:
- a sudden drop in conversions,
- low sales with high website traffic,
- increasing number of abandoned shopping carts,
- a limited number of page impressions and visits,
- a short time on the website.
UX audit is also worth considering when you plan to rebuild your website. Redesigning a website is always aimed at improving the experience of navigation, so it's worth analyzing the results to eliminate errors that reduce usability.
UX audit - what does it look like?
A well-conducted eCommerce UX audit uses both a heuristic evaluation and a usability checklist, as well as a cognitive walkthrough. It can also include tests conducted by users, which indicate final elements for improvement. It involves an experienced UX Designer who can play the role of a potential customer and point out the elements that cause negative feelings that discourage purchases.
What UX elements of your online store will be taken into account during an audit? From the structure of a homepage, through the placement of elements on a page, navigation system, and composition, to clarity and usability of content and graphics placed on the page - as well as all the others that affect conversion. The analysis takes into account the degree of alignment with the best design patterns used by eCommerce (both B2B and B2C).
After the UX audit, you should receive a report that provides you with a scoring list that includes a list of items to improve (preferably by major and minor bug hierarchy) along with recommendations on how to eliminate them in your eCommerce.
UX mistakes you should avoid
Here's a list of common UX mistakes you'll see in stores during audits that significantly reduce your desire to use the available offer:
Non-intuitive one-step-checkout
The longer the purchase process, the more discouraged the customer is - this is the obvious relationship that you should take into account at all times. The moment a client needs to provide too much data, set up an account, and obligatorily check the marketing consents, he or she may abandon the entire shopping cart and visit another online store which will not require so much engagement. They will find similar products fulfilling exactly the same functions very quickly, and the purchase itself will take them only a few seconds - plus they will not come back to your offer.
Lack of simplicity and speed of performance
Are you familiar with the phrase "form over substance"? It is very often reflected in the structure of the website. Fancy animations are not always positively received by users - much more appreciated is the simplicity, minimalism, and speed of reaching the required information. Similar feelings are provided by an overly complex store structure (resulting from the implementation of a large number of subpages), which significantly impedes navigation.
Non-friendly interface
Mismatched colors, unreadable content, wrong placement of individual elements, poor quality graphics, language errors, lack of valuable content - all these elements of the interface have a negative impact on the experience of users visiting your online store. But not only graphic and textual issues play such a role.
No responsive mobile version
The percentage of people who make purchases from a mobile version of the store is constantly increasing. If you don't take care of its responsiveness, you may lose more customers than in case of a poorly designed desktop version. It's not enough to copy tile by tile - due to the relatively compressed format, you may need to rethink the design of the mobile version to ensure the highest level of readability and intuitiveness of the shopping process.
Too much content
It happens that in order to ensure the best positioning of the website, we overwhelm the recipients with too much content. Even if it is fully substantive and provides information that may be useful, the reader may find the blocks of text too excessive and be discouraged from remaining on the site. All information made available in a short piece, in accessible language - this is what you should aim for. Bullets, bolding, highlighting, pictograms and many other available solutions can be useful here.
UX audit - for a good online store
Your goal - a user-friendly online store, right? If you care about achieving the best possible result, take advantage of the opportunities provided by expert website usability analysis. You'll see measurable benefits of changes suggested by audit specialists in a really short time, and your eCommerce customers will surely appreciate the implemented modifications.
Advox Sp. z o.o.
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61-006 Poznań, Poland
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