User Experience (UX) design has the ability to make or break any website, especially an ecommerce website. Before we can look at or seek to understand why, it’s important to know what we mean by UX design.

It’s fairly self-explanatory when you think about the words ‘user experience.’ UX includes all aspects of a person’s interaction with your company, including its services and products. When we apply this meaning to a website’s design, we’re referring to ensuring that people who visit your website, have as positive an experience as possible. Ideally, this involves meeting a customer/potential customer’s exact needs. Of course, in order to do so, we need to put effort and resources into learning a prospects ins and outs so that we can understand their needs. In most cases, this requires in-depth research to uncover as much information about users as possible so that you can ascertain as much about them as possible. Details such as:

• What sources are they coming from? Direct traffic or social media for example.
• Where are they located?
• Why are they coming to your website?
• What do they need or hope to find once they’re browsing through your site?

Once you can gather as much of this kind of information as possible, you’re well on your way to developing an understanding of the users your website is attracting and more importantly, their goals. Armed with this understanding and knowledge, you can then design the kind of website solution that includes all of the necessary UX components to meet a user’s need. By creating a fulfilling online experience that meets their needs, makes sense and is intuitive while flowing logically, you’ve got the best chance possible at converting a prospect into a regular customer.

Why is UX design good for business? We’ve seen many instances of how great UX design has transformed a company’s online presence. To quote the second President of IBM, Thomas J. Watson Jr: “Good design is good for business.” Watson Jr was clearly ahead of his time considering he made this bold declaration way back in 1973.

Think about your habits online. How likely are you to say on a website, or go back to it later, if it doesn’t meet your needs quickly and without too much effort or thought on your part? UX is good for business because it meets user’s needs effortlessly - as a result, they’re left with a positive experience and are far more likely to continue coming back and purchasing from your ecommerce website in the future. Consider this: generally speaking, if people don’t find what they’re looking for 10 to 20 seconds after landing on your site, they’ll leave your website so that they can source whatever they’re looking for elsewhere. It’s a confronting statistic but ultimately, these are the rules that govern the online space these days. The result of a user not being able to find what they’re looking for on your site is that they’re likely to eventually end up on a competitor’s site. Now that’s definitely not what you want!

You need to ensure that your website has a very clear value proposition and offers the answers your audience seeks easily and quickly. This is critical to your online success. Over the years, we’ve seen notable digital companies investing in UX and reaping the rewards. Take a look at Amazon - it’s founder, chairperson and CEO Jeff Bezos, invested 100 times more money into customer experience than advertising. And that was just in Amazon’s first year. AirBnB’s Mike Gebbia credits UX with enabling the company to generate a massive $10 billion. Meanwhile, Tom Proulx, co-founder of Intuit, was one of the pioneers of usability testing and placed a particular emphasis on ensuring products were easy to use.

At Woven, we’ve worked with numerous business owners and marketing managers to improve their UX. We provide only the best UX services and are capable of assisting with in-depth analysis, redesign, conversion audit reports or holding a discovery session. In each case, our end goal is to help you to learn more about your target market and to improve your online presence.

Contact Woven today to discuss your UX requirements with our in-house UX specialist.