You may have your eCommerce vision based on so far experience you have in website design as an eCommerce owner or project manager. You know exactly how to run your store to achieve business goals.

You are aware that the business requirements are growing and focusing on next-generation technology, marketing automation, SEO experts, customers services and the global partner ecosystem. All business activities should be concentrated on creative solutions responding to your customer’s needs.

Consider Magento UX (User Experience) as the first step to building a stable and successful business model. Read below why it’s worth it.

What is user experience?

In general, user experience refers to how a user interacts with your product or service. It includes everything from the initial idea of what you’re offering to how it’s delivered and what is the user relation with your product.

Good UX  design is essential for any e-commerce platform because it can make or break the user impression of your website. Website user experience is a feeling and individual impression that the visitor has.

To design a unique user experience, UX designers survey and search the site with qualitative and quantitative methods to find its pain points and remove obstacles that prevent users from converting, which usually means becoming a customer.

What is the conversion rate on an eCommerce website?

Conversion can refer to any desired action you want the user of your website or app to take. Websites and apps have different goals, but each typically has its own conversion rate – the number of actions leading up to a sales transaction divided by the total number of visits across these pages in order from the front door (the initial landing page) through back doors (the exit point).

For example, if 15 out of 100 site visitors make a purchase from your store, your site’s conversion rate is 15%.

Powerful UX

When you run e-commerce you know exactly how important it is to convert a visitor into a client, and a one time client into a loyal customer. You already know that attracting traffic to your store depends on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and paid ads.

When this happens, UX plays a significant role in keeping the user on the website and generating conversions. Bring your profitability eCommerce dreams into reality with:

• UX – Audit – check how people interact with your page,
• UI – User Interface Design – improve details of your page to make a huge difference in your business.

User Interface designers respect user’s expectations

User experience is crucial to the success of an eCommerce platform since most shopping experiences are entirely web-based. Businesses that have UX designer support tend to outperform competitors in user engagement and revenue.

The UX designer is responsible for ensuring customers interact with your website in a positive way. User testing, task analysis, interviews with stakeholders, card sorting exercises and surveys all contribute to creating a great user experience with increased user loyalty.

UX and UI business goal

The goal is to design user interfaces that are user-friendly, intuitive, efficient and usable in order to achieve user satisfaction on the one hand and to get sales without abandoned shopping carts on the other.

A solid UX  is built upon three pillars:

• Usability,

• Affordability,

• Credibility.

Each of these concepts should be considered in the UI design process to ensure your website meets UX standards.

5 Tips to improve Magento website User Experience

Consumers need a simple and convenient shopping experience that will make them loyal customers. Magento is a unique solution, unlike others. The software is easily customizable, allowing for multiple store configurations in different languages.

Magento is an open-source eCommerce system that can be customized for any business. There are many design considerations when building a Magento user experience, such as:

1. Evaluation of who your target audience is, and what are its needs.
2. Design user interfaces UI that is user-friendly, efficient, and easy to use.
3. Use effective navigation menus and layout structures to organize information on the page, especially on the product pages.
4. Keep in mind the credibility of your website by making sure all information and branding is accurate.
5. Test website functions with real people to get feedback on their performance.

Following these guidelines should help you create a user experience that meets or exceeds customer expectations, resulting in increased sales and customer loyalty.

Why is UX design important?

UX design will allow you to improve your analytical methods, not hypothetically improve your mind. Although Magento provides its core template with extensions that improve the UI, we want to discover which one would best fit your store and users specific needs. We expand the Magento usage perspective where necessary. Iterative is very important for UX. A few important points can be reached through testing.

UX Audit at Panda Group

At Panda Group the UX Audit consists of 3 elements:

1. Analysis –  How does your Magento store works and respond to clients expectations?
2. Bugs Identifications – What obstacles prevent clients from taking action in your store?
3. Recommendations – improvements we suggest to improve your client’s User Experience and boost sales.

For this purpose,  we conduct a cognitive, qualitative and quantitative search of your Magento store and the competitors on the market.

Competitors benchmark

At this stage, we compare your store with your competition, as well as to other e-commerce solutions, pointing out those which in our opinion are worth considering in your store. We focus on the most crucial pages for your business. These may include the checkout, cart,  product page, favourites, top menu, comparison engine, flow between favourites and shopping cart. We identify these at the beginning of the survey.

As the effect of this process, you will get a list of recommended solutions for your Magento store collected from the market.

Cognitive journey

We will identify the pain points of your competitor’s online stores to find solutions and implement them in your store. The goal here is to gain an advantage over the competition by implementing solutions better than the ones existing in similar stores and overcoming their weak points.

Quantitative and qualitative onsite search

Based on the data gathered by Google Analytics and HotJar in your store e.g. goals accomplishments, visitors characteristics, actions made on the website, depth of the visits, time spent on the site, what pages are the most popular. 

In this phase, we will answer the following questions by evaluating the store with different tools:

• Is the shopping process intuitive – what are the possible obstacles in the shopping path?
• Are users interacting with the page in the way we expect?
  • how deep do they explore?
  • do they fill out the form?
  • do they use personal accounts?
  • do they use favourites?
  • do they read blogs?
• Who are the page users?

Personas identification workshop

We will also recommend a workshop to identify personas, your ideal customers, based on the data collected and the experience of your employees. Usually, this is 2-4 personas divided between B2C and B2B markets. 

They have different needs and expectations that we want to identify. What’s more, we recognise their demographics (age, sex, marital and parental status, location), professional/social status, interests, skills, goals, needs, pain points and purpose for buying the product.

5-sec test – real users behaviour

We are also interested in how real users react to the store in the first 5 sec. and how they complete given tasks. We analyse the first impression and check if the environment is not confusing and clear enough for users to complete the actions taken.

We ask them to make certain actions in the store, such as buying a product, adding to favourites or comparing products, page searching, login, personal account setting. We observe and analyse their behaviour to discover eventual obstacles.

10 Jacob Nielsen’s usability heuristics

These are interface design standards, we follow them to help users interact with your Magento e-commerce platform. They put the user in a central point of the experience and analyse the encountered from that perspective, checking that:

1. The state of the system is clear to the user, and he or she knows what it’s about.
2. Vocabulary is understandable, no jargon is used.
3. Emergency exits are available to withdraw from unwanted action.
4. Page is built according to standards so as not to confuse users.
5. Actions made on the page are possibly conscious and well explained with appropriate instructions and predictions of consequences.
6. Actions do not require memorisation and are based on easier recognition for the user.
7. Shortcuts are available for experienced users to make them feel comfortable.
8. Information is relevant and precise and the design is minimalistic so as not to blur the communication.
9. Communication about errors is clear and problem-solving.
10. Help documentation is accessible if needed by the user.

We scan the page precisely to check if it’s relevant and follows the above rules. As a result of the usability heuristic analysis, you will receive a prioritized list of fixes: critical, serious, volunteer so you can decide which ones to implement.

Conclusions and recommendations

At the end of the UX audit, you will receive an overall report with conclusions and recommendations resulting from all the analyses. The goal is to create a picture of your store from the user’s perspective and with your competition as a background. It will refer to the homepage, product page, menu, cart, favourites, product comparison,  site search, product filtering, customer account etc.

Generally speaking, the UX Recommendation Report will consist of key areas of your store, describing ways to improve them. All suggestions will be based on data as UX audit is a tool of data-driven business running.

Page loading time for better UX

Apart from the above, please consider site loading time for better UX in addition to UI design.  It’s important to focus on optimizing your web page for better loading time. Studies have shown that a slow loading website can lead to lost customers, and lost revenue.

There are many things you can do to reduce the loading time of your website, including compressing images, using content delivery networks, and minimizing code. You can use cache to store static versions of your pages on the user’s computer, which will speed up load times.

Focusing on user-friendly design and optimizing your website for better load times will keep your customers happy and coming back for more.

Web design supporting SEO 

Google pay more and more attention to user convenience when browsing sites and creates metrics to measure it more effectively. As an e-commerce owner, you probably realise the importance of following Google’s recommendations.

We recommend the Hyvä Theme to optimise the Magento store for good with Google’s new metrics called Core Web Vitals. The reasonable amount of code and simplicity of this new solution will make your store stable and quick loading, meeting the expectations of customers and Google.

More about this please read in our E-book.

Conclusion

We hope we’ve convinced you to consider the UX approach to your online business. The audit may be the first step to reveal potential hidden in your business, convert more users into clients and build customers loyalty.

A UX audit will reveal existing constraints of your Magento store, and UI amendments will remove them easily, as most of them are slight changes.

All these together will certainly support your business scaling up.  When your eCommerce have traffic already, the sale is stable and you are looking for a way of boosting it do not hesitate. Let’s talk!