Lead UX Designer

Ari Scott

# 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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# 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

UX Lead at Fruition

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