Everyone keeps talking about a "user-friendly" experience, but do they really know what being user friendly means? For many business owners and ecommerce entrepreneurs, this usually means that your website is easy to use. Working with a professional web design team can help you create a user experience that is not just friendly, but profitable.
Factor One: Ease of Use
Your web design team will focus on making your ecommerce site easy to use. Ease of use means that the architecture, or the way the site is built, is intuitive. For many customers, using computers is almost like breathing. By now, almost two generations have been living with computers since their childhoods. But this is not the market you are targeting.
Anyone should be able to use your website -- this is what makes the Apple operating system so successful. Ecommerce websites that reduce the number of steps and make it easy to choose and buy are the most successful ones. The harder your website is to use, the less sales you make.
Factor Two: No Complexities
Many ecommerce websites are easily recognizable. They have the catalogue look people are familiar with: products in categories, priced and easy to sort with just a click of a button. But there is always that one website that just has to make it really hard for users to find things, almost like they are playing a game of virtual hide and seek.
Your web development team should be able to break down your products into categories that are easy to find and use. It should be easy for your customers to find anything simply by using a search bar. If your search bar needs an FAQ, you need a redesign.
Factor Three: They Know Their Customers
What is the X factor when it comes to websites? It is a strange mix of great design and just the right product. People go online to look for things they like or want and knowing your customer is half the battle.
For example, on Pinterest, a specialty website that focuses on organizing content, users spend an average of 3 hours a day surfing through its contents. 60% of the people who surf through Pinterest are women. As a result, Pinterest has refined its categories for its user base to include, among other things, a wedding category and a fitness category.
In short, it has become kind of like a woman's magazine.
Factor Four: Great Design Isn't Necessarily Complex
Some of the best websites are the simplest -- in fact, some of them are just updated, polished versions of what they were in 1992. But great design is not about how much pizzazz you can jam into the website, it is about how functional the website really is. If it works well and looks great, users will flock to it. If it works well and has great content, but does not look so good, then users will still go to it if it is what they like.
Your web development team can help you strike the balance between clean design and functionality. Your ecommerce website probably does not need that huge testimonial flash intro that features 10 of your best customers. Or maybe it does. Your professional web design team can help you decide.
Factor Five: They Know Themselves
Great user-friendly websites have no pretentions. They know who they are and what they sell, and are not afraid to make excuses or improve on it. They know what they are and what their customers want.
Many user-friendly websites are user-friendly because they focus on the customer first. Many novice ecommerce websites are so focused on spreading the brand that they lose sight of who they want to share the brand with: the audience, the buyer, the customer. This is perhaps the greatest factor of a user-friendly website: the ability to know, improve and laugh at itself.
A professional web design team will never move forward without asking you what you want from the business and asking you what customers want from the business. Striking this balance is crucial to the success of a user friendly website and the success of your ecommerce business.
