Key UX Principles to Help Your Product Pages
01/12/2019 | Share:
UX is important
User experience, or UX, can be a crucial necessity when it comes to e-commerce. It’s important that you make your store simple and easy to use for its visitors.
Let’s imagine this as if we were shopping at two supermarkets that sell identical products at identical prices. One supermarket is set out in aisles with each aisle clearly labelled. The second supermarket is laid out like a maze with no clear signposting or direction. Which shop are you most likely to find what you’re looking for?
This is the same for e-commerce stores. It shouldn’t be a struggle to browse or for people to get to where they need to be.
Navigation
Website navigation is one of the main UX elements you can focus on. After all, if your customer can’t find their way to the product pages, how will they be able to reach the checkout?
There’s nothing wrong with being creative and making your e-commerce store look stylish but be sure to keep things simple when it comes to navigation. A lot of stores focus on a few main menu buttons before narrowing that down into a more detailed submenu.
Page depth
Alongside navigation, you need to ensure that people don’t get lost in the depths of your site with no way out other than the cross button. It’s normal for e-commerce stores to showcase pages and pages of store content, which can get confusing, so it’s always a good idea to make sure the customer can return to the homepage as well as have access to the menu, search bar and filters.
Search options
Every e-commerce site should have a search bar in a place that is easy to locate, usually at the top of the page. It should also allow for advanced search parameters and filters such as price range, sizes, colours and more, to help users easily narrow their search to find and buy what they’re looking for.
Without an obvious search bar that functions correctly, you risk losing customers that are shopping for something specific to a competitor with better search capabilities.
Infinite Scrolling
Chances are that if you’ve got an e-commerce website with plenty of products, you’ll have more than one page to show. If this is the case, you’ll need to make a decision about how you want your pages to display.
With infinite scrolling, you can choose to keep loading products as the user scrolls down, which is very similar to social media browsing and may resonate well with your audience if they appreciate a seamless browsing experience, especially on mobile.
However, the drawback is that infinite scrolling can create page speed issues if many products are loaded on the same page with a device that has limited resources. Furthermore, people don’t know how many products are remaining and it’s hard to come back to a product later on. For someone looking for a specific product, this may be a frustration also. For these cases, we’d recommend including filters and advanced search options to help people narrow down their options.
Pagination
Alternatively, you can paginate, which means to limit your page to a certain number of products and number the pages. This is the preferred option for most e-commerce stores and you’ll have likely seen this on plenty of websites.
It makes finding specific products much easier because all you have to do is remember the page number you saw it on. You also know, before you start browsing, roughly how many products there are to see. It’s important to ensure that users can spend some time browsing through the products, without having to click through the next page too often.
Calculate the right amount of products to have on the page before a user reaches a link to the next page. On the other hand, as some e-commerce websites do, you could even offer the option for users to choose how many products they want to see per page.
Mobile-Friendly Design
All of the above should be suitable for both desktop and mobile. In today’s world, mobile optimisation should carry just as much weight as desktop. People are using their phones more and more to research products and make subsequent purchases. A seamless and easy mobile experience is proven to help with sales and conversions.
