# UX Practices All eCommerce Sites Should Consider

The user experience can define an eCommerce site’s success. From navigating your site to comparing product descriptions and checking out, the user experience should be effortless and intuitive. If the process is cumbersome or difficult, your company could end up losing business, no matter how great your products are. To help you capture more business and simplify your user experience, read our top 9 UX tips for eCommerce sites.  

## 1.  Create A Strong Homepage 
Your homepage should have a clear point of focus and a strong call to action at the top of the page. Consider what products and product categories are most valuable to your customer and make those options available from the homepage.  
## 2.  Simplify Navigation Menus 
Visitors should be able to quickly and easily navigate your site using navigation menus. When creating these menus, think about the different products on the site and how they can be categorized into broader topics.  Avoid making these menus overly specific. With too many links in your primary navigation, customers may have a harder time finding what they’re looking for.  
## 3.  Make The Search Bar Easy To Find 
One of the primary ways customers find eCommerce products is by searching for specific product terms. If they can’t find the search bar, they’ll get frustrated and leave the site. Make the search bar easier to find by placing it close to the primary navigation links. Be sure the search bar is easy to find on both desktop and mobile.  
## 4.  Streamline The Checkout Process 
The checkout process is one of the most critical flows on an eCommerce site. If the process is too long or complicated, customers can easily get frustrated and abandon the purchase. Simplify your process by only requiring the essential information and not forcing customers to enter repeat information. For example, if the billing and shipping address is the same, users should only have to enter it one time.  
## 5.  Allow Customers To Check Out As Guests 
Most customers want to complete the checkout process as quickly as they can, and requiring users to create an account may lead to increased cart abandonment. A successful checkout flow should allow guests to complete their purchase as a guest without creating an account. It’s okay to give users the option to create an account, but to increase sales, it should never be required.    
## 6.  Add Breadcrumbs 
Breadcrumbs are a secondary navigation system that show users where they are in your site. Breadcrumbs often appear as follows: Women’s > All Women’s Shoes > Sandals. Including breadcrumbs can help users navigate the site and quickly return to previous pages. 
## 7.  Prioritize Page Load Speed 
The longer your website takes to load, the higher your bounce rate will be. Decrease each page’s load time by making sure images are compressed, removing plugins you aren’t using, and making sure you’re using a fast hosting provider.  
## 8.  Make Sure Your Website Is Responsive 
Many users will access your site through mobile devices. To keep these visitors on your page you’ll need to optimize your website for mobile. If not, users will most likely visit a different site that works better on their phones.  
## 9.  Use High Quality Images     
High quality product images can help increase customer interest in a product and lead to higher conversion rates. In addition to the quality of the image, it’s important to provide multiple angles and provide pictures of any product accessories. Since customers can’t pick up a product when shopping online, your site will need to fill in the gaps and show off all every part of your product.   Aren’t sure if your eCommerce site is delivering? Reach out to Fruition. Our team can help you provide a great user experience, increase conversions, and build brand loyalty. 

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Discover actionable UX practices geared towards ecommerce sites to enhance user navigation, boost sales, and foster customer loyalty.

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Essential UX Strategies to Boost eCommerce Conversions

# Why Mobile Optimization Is Key For Your Website’s Success

With 211 million people using mobile search in the U.S. alone, mobile optimization is becoming more and more important to the success of your business. From finding services near them to researching brands or exploring products, more people are using their smartphones to interact with companies than ever before - and that number is going up every year. To capture this traffic and find new customers, it’s crucial to optimize your business’ site for mobile. Learn more about why mobile optimization can help get your website in front of new consumers and help visitors convert to customers.  

## Boost Your Search Engine Rankings 
In 2018, Google announced the switch to mobile-first indexing, which means sites will be ranked based on the mobile version of each page. That means that even if your desktop version is completely optimized and you have great content, you’ll rank below competitors with mobile optimized sites.   

## Faster Website Loading Speed 
Mobile optimized sites are created to load quickly while on the go. Today’s users expect quick loading times, and many won’t settle for less. In fact, about 40% of mobile users will abandon a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, which means if your site isn't meeting those expectations, you’re almost assuredly losing visitors and potential customers.  

## Give Users A Better Browsing Experience 
Have you ever clicked into a site, only to immediately click out because it was hard to navigate on your smartphone? If your site doesn’t have a responsive mobile design, the same thing may happen to your site’s visitors. A clean, easy-to-use mobile design not only helps your users find your website, but it entices them to stay on your site longer and learn more about your business. 

## Increase Customer Loyalty 
Your website says a lot about who you are as a brand. A well-designed mobile experience can gain the trust of visitors and make them more likely to convert in the future. By the same token, a poorly-designed website can alienate visitors and convince them not to purchase from your business. Just 3 seconds of waiting can decrease customer satisfaction by 16%, which can have big financial implications; 79% of shoppers who aren’t satisfied with website performance report that they’re less likely to buy from the site again.   At Fruition, we design every site with a mobile-first approach to help you top the search engine results pages and give your visitors an unparalleled user experience. Learn more about our mobile designs by contacting us today! 


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Mobile optimization is important for every website. Learn why taking a mobile-first design approach to your site can help your business succeed.

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Why Mobile Optimization Is Key For Your Website’s Success

# 6 Website Design Mistakes You Should Avoid

A great website design will build trust, share your brand story, and guide users through the marketing funnel. On the other hand, poor web design can erode user trust before visitors even read about your company. About 75% of users make judgments about a company’s credibility based on visual design alone, making design a key aspect in any successful business. To help you design an effective site, we’re sharing 6 website design mistakes you should always avoid - no matter your industry, product, or service. 

## 1. Low-Quality Logos 
Your logo is one of the most important pieces of branding on your website, so make sure it stands out. Use a high-resolution version that looks good on retina screens. If you can, use an SVG - this file type can be scaled to about any size and maintain its resolution. 

## 2. Poor Image Quality 
Photos are some of the most important aspects of a site. Using high-quality photos will make your website feel more professional and keep users engaged. Instead of relying on high-quality stock photos, invest in a professional photographer. Sharing professional photos of your building, products, or staff on your site, social media, and email campaigns can increase brand loyalty and recognition.  
**Read More:** Does Your Site’s Imagery Reflect Your Brand Identity? 

## 3. Unoptimized Content 
Many companies make the mistake of using big blocks of copy on their websites. However, most users skim web content and don’t take time to read every single sentence. When writing content, keep it as concise as you can and break up the text with subheaders, bullet points, and other visual cues. 

## 4. No Calls To Action (CTAs) 
Your site should have clear CTAs that incite action and direct users to the content you’re looking for. When designing your CTAs, keep the customer journey in mind. Someone who is brand new to your site may need a “learn more” CTA to read about your values and services, while someone who is ready to purchase will look for a “buy now” button. 

## 5. No Mobile-Friendly Version 
Between smartphones and tablets, users are on mobile devices more than ever. Make sure you capitalize on mobile traffic by building a responsive design that’s optimized for every device, from desktops to tablets and phones. 

## 6. Missing 404 Page Design 
No one wants their site to have 404 errors, but you should be prepared for them with a great design. A creative and brand-specific 404 error page gives you additional opportunities for: 
- **Branding:** A custom 404 page strengthens your brand image and increases the likelihood that visitors will continue exploring your site, rather than leaving it 
- **Trust building:** Strong 404 pages can further establish your reliability and build trust between you and your consumers 
- **SEO:** You can add links to important parts of your site, which helps search engines better understand your sitemap 
- **Fun:** A 404 error is never fun, but a creative and engaging 404 page can soften the blow

Great design is at the heart of every successful website. If you’re not sure how your design stacks up, contact us today! Our design team excels at creating visually stunning and effective sites to build loyalty and encourage action. 

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Dive into an effective guide loaded with suggestions for enriching your website's design – from logos, images, and content to CTAs and 404-page designs.

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Enhance Mobile Traffic & User Involvement | Web Design Improvement Guide

# How Developers Optimize UX For Your Brand Website

At Fruition, we know that UX, or user experience, is becoming ever more important for website development, which is why we center UX/UI optimization in our clients’ site build outs. Fruition prides ourselves on delivering high-quality sites designed with targeted users in mind in order to increase our clients’ conversions—and maintain their users’ trust. A huge part of this design process is working through the user experience.  Here’s how Fruition’s UX designers work with our devs to keep our clients’ websites optimized. 

## How Does UX Design Benefit Your Website?
In a nutshell, UX web design is a process of learning how your most important and most frequent users interact with your website (or websites like the one you’re planning) so that developers and designers can work together to optimize your site for increasing conversions. UX design ensures that your website actually functions the way it should, and that all of your other branding and marketing efforts to drive traffic to your brand’s website are meaningful.  

At Fruition, our UX designers work with our clients to help solve problems that they’re facing by designing elegant and useful solutions to those problems. Our UX designers and developers work together to glean information from actual users, then together, they build a website that provides a more improved experience overall for their target audience. When we talk about UX design, that encompasses everything from how the site looks to how it functions to how fast it is.  Related: 6 Website Design Mistakes You Should Avoid

## How Does Our UX Team Work with Our Dev Team?
While in some ways our UX process changes from client to client based on individual needs, the general UX web design process at Fruition, like many of our other branding processes, starts with discovery.  Typically, our clients come to us with an existing website, web product, or web application, and they’re looking to improve conversion rates to help with their business goals, or looking to relieve pain points or frustrations that users are having with their websites. The UX process is designed to address those needs and goals. 

## UX Discovery Project
During the [discovery phase of the UX process](/services/website-design), the team will do research around the data and analytics from the existing site, trying to understand who the users are and what they’re doing on the site. Heatmaps, Google analytics, and all kinds of different tools come into play for this part of the process. Essentially the UX design team is asking things like “Where are the users scrolling?”, “What are they clicking on?”, and “What links are users actually clicking on?”   Most importantly, our UX designers interview actual users of the website to find out what is and isn’t working for them, how they typically use the website, and what could be improved from their perspective. Talking with actual users is paramount to UX design—it is important to keep the experience of actual users in mind because the way they use a brand’s site might be surprising or counter to assumptions.  Once we understand how users interact with the website, we enter what is called the “define” phase. At this point, we look at sitemaps. We ask questions like, “do we need to change the site’s architecture to match the users’ needs?” and “Do certain pages need to be easier to find?” and “What does the user flow look like?” From there, the UX designers make recommendations, and build out what is called a keep-kill-combine plan as part of that process.  

## Wireframing 
Next is the design phase, when we get into the actual wireframing. That’s when the UX designers really start to work with our developers. At this stage, we’re really trying to think about content, storytelling, and functionality, as well as the aesthetic layout of the page. During this phase, we work with the developers to help us call out any red flags from a coding standpoint. We might have a really cool idea on the design side, but if it would end up adding something like 20 hours of unnecessary development time, we would then try to rethink that solution in a different way that provides a good user experience but cuts down the dev time.  
![Service-Detail-UX-UI-Wireframes-min.jpg](https://s3.us-east-1.wasabisys.com/cdn.fruition.net/Service_Detail_UX_UI_Wireframes_min_246732d2ca.jpg)

## Initial Build
At this point, we move into the build out phase, when we work directly with our front end developer to review those different components. After the initial build is complete, the UX team handles QA, so that we can ensure that what our developers have built matches our designs. 

## Some Key Best Practices for UX Design
In terms of **UX design best practices** , at Fruition we believe in staying on top of the latest trends as well as making critical assessments of what tends to be working or not working in each industry. When we make design recommendations, they’re always based on an existing design pattern—we’re not going to waste time reinventing the wheel, especially when we could be spending more time optimizing each clients’ sites based on their individual needs.  Sometimes, you’ll see a design trend introduced, and then everybody just picks it up if it’s trendy and new, rather than actually A/B testing to determine whether that design element actually makes sense from a UX perspective. A good example of this is the carousel banner. For a while there, carousel banners were very trendy, but they’re actually a really poor UX practice, according to data and research. Most users won’t sit there staring at the homepage banner for it to cycle through each image. Instead, after they glance at the banner, they start to scroll, meaning that your users are missing two or three other banner images that they’ll never see.   

## Accessibility Design Best Practices
Another good best practice is to center accessibility in your UX design. It’s important to check your website for ADA accessibility best practices. For instance, color contrast is super important, and we see violations of that quite a bit.  In conclusion, while you can redesign a website without all the research and data that a team of UX designers provides, you probably won’t end up with a site that improves or solves all the problems that your users face. 

## Team Approach to UX - Dev and Design Working Together
At Fruition, our UX designers and website developers work together all the time, so our communication is very strong. Instead of dealing with an extended, complicated back-and-forth on why design should trump development or vice versa, our teams work together so that your site is the best it can be. 

Delivering high-quality brand websites, Fruition's proficient UX Designers collaborate with our developers, shaping heightened user experiences that drive conversions and user trust.

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Ari Scott

Lead UX Designer

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