As a business owner starting in the e-commerce space there are many things to consider. In fact, there are so many that it could drive you mad! Reaching profitable agreements with your providers, considering the logistics, or defining your new brand image are just some of them. But for me, the most important one is to create a terrific shopper experience both for desktop and, above all, smartphones (especially now that mobile web browsing has overtaken desktop). This is where user experience, also known as UX, really matters.
Let’s define UX. It’s about how easy, simple and enjoyable your website or app is to use. Think of your website and your app as if they were a salesperson. You wouldn’t want your salesperson to be rude, dirty or untidy, would you? It’s important to consider this in order to provide the best UX possible. This, alongside your other business strategies, will help you to better retain your customers.
Here are 10 tips to improve your UX for mobile commerce (m-commerce):
1. Show a Clear Product/Service Offering in Your First Screen
The first thing a user will do when they land on your site is to scan your whole page or app to try to understand what your product is about. If they can’t do this easily, the chances are they’ll abandon your site. Time is money and there are many competitors just one click away! To avoid losing your user to another site, display your navigation categories at the top of your website. You can complement them using icons or images to make them easier to recognize.
2. Use Simple Forms
When you set up a form on your site, do you want users to submit it or not? For some sites it seems the answer is no, as they have too many fields, they’re not responsive (which means they don’t adapt correctly to different screen sizes), or they don’t work as they’re supposed to. Think about what you really need to ask your customers. The shorter the form, the better. It’s said that information is power, but if it’s too complicated it will impact on sales.
3. Reduce Your Loading Time
According to Google’s webmaster guidelines, one of the most important things for every site is loading time. If a giant like Google says that, it’s probably a good idea to focus your efforts on improving this aspect of your website. One thing you can do is to use robust and high-performing plugins. This is where tested, supported and updated plugins, such as POWr’s, can make a difference!
4. Use Calls-to-Action in Every Section
Every section of your website or app should have a clear objective. Complete a form, download an asset or add a product to your shopping cart are some examples. So, when a user lands on any section of your website or app, you should clearly direct them to what you want them to do next. A strong call-to-action (CTA) will help you guide users to the next step. Make sure you always make this obvious!
5. Make Buttons Clearer
Closely related to CTAs, buttons have to clearly explain what will happen if you click them. “Add” or “Download” are not telling the user clearly enough what they do. Try “Add to cart” or “Download this free guide”, you’ll soon see that they perform much better.
6. Use Video Content
If content is King, video is the crown. In fact, we could write a whole post solely on video. Yes, you need text for SEO, but if you’re familiar with trying to read a lot of text on your phone, you’ll probably agree that it isn’t the nicest way of consuming content. Try to include video in your strategy as much as you can. Video content drives purchase behaviour, creates stronger customer engagement and also increases trust.
7. Avoid Popups
If popup windows annoy you in desktop, it’s much worse on mobile devices. The screen is smaller and pop-up can take a big share of it, so usually they don’t allow the user to see the content they’re looking for. Unless you use the popup as your final attempt to retain a user and only show it when your user is leaving your shop without buying, I’d strongly recommend avoiding them. It’s worth noting that they can increase your bounce rate too.
8. Design a Step-by-Step Onboarding Experience
I believe that taking inspiration from leaders in the m-commerce space is almost always a good idea. For example, Airbnb’s onboarding experience involves a multi-step form and just one single question per screen. They might have more steps, but it’s a simpler process overall. It's easier to digest and the form flows more like a conversation than a generic form. You may be thinking, with so many screens are my users going to leave the funnel? You can combat this by displaying a progress bar. This can be very useful, particularly in your checkout process.
9. Testing is a Must
Although I have given you some suggestions that usually work, every business is different and what works for one may not work for another. You need to test to check which strategies perform better for your business and build on them. Analytics is the only way to make your business grow.
10. Convert Your Website into an App
Finally, my last tip. Have you ever thought of converting your website into an app? Now is the time of mobile first! Whether a mobile-optimized website or an app better suits your strategy depends on you, but an app can be a more controlled environment. This generally means better performance, easy push notifications and access to the device’s hardware. You need to evaluate if it’s worth it, but today you can easily create your app with an app builder without your budget taking a huge hit.
Improving your UX for a better mobile user experience isn’t something you can achieve in a couple of days. Although working on your UX could mean retaining more customers and decreasing bounce rates, I know you have many other tasks. I hope you now have a clearer idea of where to start once you’re ready to boost your mobile UX!
This guest post was written by Juanjo Gómez, CMO at King of App “the WordPress of the mobile apps”. As the first open source app builder we want to make the process of creating an app easier and cheaper. And much more, because you own the code!