November 1st , 2017

Good and Bad Ecommerce UX Design Trends for Ecommerce Site Owners

Ecommerce

Today we are experiencing advent of ecommerce technologies and a steep rise in ecommerce usage thanks to mobile revolution or evolution! The trend towards online shopping is favoring ecommerce web development services and ecommerce apps in the mobile app marketplaces. Now it is mandatory to have an ecommerce app and an ecommerce website along with brick-and-mortar store. Modern shoppers visit the brick store and compare the products online, which they have touched and examined physically. Ecommerce provides immense opportunities to acquire high quality products at the best price tags and best bargaining in terms of deals, discounts, gifts, and vouchers. These all complications and advancements in the shopping behavior of ecommerce visitors have made the job of ecommerce developers daunting. User experiences or UX is a paramount factor considered for successful online business, and next are usability and performance of ecommerce storefront. Ecommerce UX designers across the world and from the leading agencies are releasing reports on ecommerce UX design trends time-to-time. Based on such reports we have illustrated some good and bad ecommerce UX design trends prevailing today in the world of the Internet.  

Good Ecommerce UX Design Trends

Let’s first see good things to cool our eyes and mind!

Visuals Dominating Ecommerce UX Design:

Today life-size images are dominating the ecommerce screens and spaces. Impressive product images with high resolutions, zoom facilities, and retina ready are alluring shoppers on mobiles and other devices with Internet access and mobile app access. Multi-faceted images remove the need of touching the product in reality and videos are augmenting the products one-level up. Product demos are replacing product usage document need and win the hearts of ecommerce visitors immediately. Moreover, the video backgrounds are delivering beautiful and engaging shopping experiences on all size of screens.  

Parallax Effects and Animations Elevating the UX Designs of Ecommerce:

One thing is acting extremely positive in favor of mobile ecommerce users, and it is scrolling. Mobile users love scrolling the screen UI/page thanks to easy touch gestures. It allows designers to extend the page layout lengthier than normal. Scrolling also favors large image size as it becomes easy to scroll on tiny screens. For UX designers, storytelling is the best policies to woo ecommerce visitors for the best user experiences. Animations are helping storytelling, and parallax design is encouraging longer content layout design to support the scrolling love of ecommerce shoppers. Infographics, Gif-o-graphics, and textual content like approaches are highly trendy for storytelling designs. Thus, visual narratives have made content consumptions easy and pleasing experiences that ultimately ends up in high conversion rate and repeat business opportunities.  

Incorporating Artificial Intelligence Technologies in Ecommerce:

Dynamic search is dominating ecommerce landscape when it mingles with AI voice assistants like Siri in iOS devices. Now, the third party AI voice assistant software are available and can be integrated easily with ecommerce live chats or customized as Chatbots. Therefore, today we are observing Chatbot trends rising on ecommerce websites and mobile applications of the leading brands in the world. Real-time Chatbots are offering exclusive options for customer services without disrupting UX of ecommerce sites. Moreover, ecommerce UX experts are experimenting AI voice search and Chatbots like options to provide innovative ways to serve the shoppers in real-time and increasing their purchase with greater ROI.  

Interactive Shopping Experiences by Card Design, Material Design, and Animations:

Material design propagated by Google Inc. It is now trendy in ecommerce niche too. Vibrant colors, shadows and other effects, and content focused approaches makes material design the most favorite for UX designers. Card layouts ease responsive web design issues by providing simplicity in navigation for a big list of categories and products on ecommerce pages and ecommerce mobile apps. Subtle to focused animations on ecommerce help ecommerce UX designers to offer highly interactive UX. For instance, interactive buttons displaying spins, rotations, and movements are lovely UI elements for ecommerce UX designers. Hovering effects, zoom, and switching images help on product pages and elsewhere to offer excellent UX. Color changes in icons, texts, and buttons are speaking visual languages and confirm various activities by the ecommerce users on the web page, shopping cart, or in the mobile app.  

Big Data for Ecommerce Predictions & UX Improvements:

Today ecommerce stores have a plenty of products in a number of various categories and advanced personalization technologies to grab various user info, user behavior data, analytics data, and so many other sources to collect structured and unstructured or machine generated data. Therefore, ecommerce stores are leveraging Big Data technologies to collect, analyze, and visualize the big data using big data management software, as well as analytics and data visualization tools to get deeper insights to make useful predictions for their online businesses. Big Data technologies also ease the personalization in ecommerce with theme based designs for better UX. Customized and personalized user experiences come through the amalgamation of various technologies and today we have everything to make it possible. If ecommerce developers are smartly using ecommerce data visualization technologies in favor of shoppers at frontend and ecommerce owners in the backend, the conversion rate would be high for those stores online. Real-time analytics software in conjunction with AI technologies like Chatbots can increase conversion to a greater extent. Predicting shopping patterns of ecommerce buyers can help ecommerce to develop effective strategies and marketing.  

Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality Technologies for Ecommerce UX Design:

Virtual fitting rooms are proving astounding experiences for the end-users of apparel and clothing ecommerce niches. Webcams and headsets are offering try out clothes and accessories opportunities in ecommerce shopping journey. Virtual reality based ecommerce applications and websites offer completely immersive shopping experiences and mixing reality with fantasy for ecommerce shoppers.  

Ecommerce UX Design for Robust Reviews:

Apart from inducing trust factors in your ecommerce storefronts or an app, reviews and ratings have a lot of advantages such as:
  • They help users to understand products and product usage more
  • Reviews address concerns of shoppers regarding products and purchase
  • With reviews, users can get factual information and answers to several queries
  • Reviews provide opportunities to augment user generated content by summarizing it
  • By emphasizing keywords and phrases used in positive as well as negative reviews
  • By addition of reviews with required details using the latest CMS and review editing technologies ecommerce can build or manage online reputation
  • Reviews displays strengths and weakness of products or ecommerce supports or services transparently (Of course, only with transparent and honest reviews by real users of products)
 

Redeeming Marketing Incentives with Excellent UX Design in Ecommerce

Earlier, redeeming coupons, vouchers, and gift certificates were touch for online shoppers due to real-time and advanced technologies for ecommerce design. Now, we have everything to enhance the trust of shoppers who are scrappy to redeem their variety of marketing incentive including coupon code. Many ecommerce developers use technologies to redeem incentives before checkout process and in a shopping cart while some are offering such facilities in the midst or at the end of checkout process but before final payment or invoice preparation. By providing coupon or incentive redeeming opportunity as early as possible, ecommerce store saves erosion of trust and frustrations of beneficiary shoppers.
 

Bad Ecommerce UX Design Trends

Now, let’s focus on bad things and take measures to save from their hazardous impacts on your online shops.

Hard to Find & Inadequate Product Description

A product may have a plenty of attributes, and an image of the product is inadequate to depict all. Therefore, short as well as a detailed product description is essential to describe the major attributes. Short Description grabs the immediate attentions of page scanners and compels them to stay on the page and go for more. Long product descriptions, if written by professional copywriter/content writer, it lures shoppers to go ahead in conversion funnel and convert easily as well as rapidly. Unfortunately, recent trends are negative in a sense that too little product descriptions and also place at the far away from the main product image and in the bottom of the page, so hard to find at a glance.  

Absence of Strong Indicators for Add-to-Cart Items

When a customer of ecommerce is adding an item in the cart, the shopper is eager to confirm that it has done righteously and immediately. It is because in brick store, they can see the product in the real cart of the store while on ecommerce store, they have to visit the shopping cart page each time they add something to it, and that may prove frustrating experience for the shoppers who are going to buy multiple items. Some ecommerce sites take care of these insignificant user experiences and nuances of ecommerce. They use text message with prominent fonts and colors to describe that an item is added and some info on it. Moreover, the shopping cart icon, on the top of the fold also display the numbers of items added, and whenever a new addition takes place, it reflects the changes in attention grabbing manner, not subtly so none can take notice of it.  

Cramped Customer Service Area Design

With increased traffic, the use of customer service page is increasing. Shoppers also expect good user experiences there. Unfortunately, cluttered content and cramped layout design, intimidating users and spoil the reputation of the entire ecommerce business and design. If ecommerce stores take care of customer service pages along with other ecommerce pages and updating it regularly, it can be a good source to win the favor by the customers who had visited it. The Recent introduction of Chatbots or live chats like advanced technologies has solved customer service issues at a greater extent.    

Conclusion:

We have seen a number of good website designers with best UX design trends and a few bad ones in the current post. You might have noticed that the most of the good ecommerce UX design trends are relying on new technologies and incorporations of intricate services including cloud, GPS, and others to your ecommerce website design projects. It ultimately demands the experienced and expert ecommerce UX designers with a knack in the latest technologies and trends prevailing on the web and mobile niches. Addon Solutions have the right set of teams of ecommerce web design with supporting infrastructural facilities to address any scale of needs of offshore clients. Come and test the capabilities of our ecommerce development team by starting conversations on your dream ecommerce web or mobile app development project. You may see the differences that we make in the competitive market.