Design Method
Ecommerce Tools That Improve User Experience and Boost Sales
If you run an eCommerce business, you will always be on the lookout for ways to boost sales and increase profits. Research has shown that making even the slightest adjustment in your website’s user experience can lead to substantial increases in your conversion rate. And that means more sales.
With so much noise online, it can be challenging to determine the most effective ways to research, design, and collaborate on these changes. Fortunately, with more eCommerce sites competing for customer eyes and wallets, application developers have been creating tools to make the process more efficient for businesses of all sizes.
Here are some of the tools that you can use to improve user experience on your eCommerce site.
Research
Before designing or making adjustments to your eCommerce site, you must do your own research. Sure, you can go with your gut and experiment. But if you want to save time and keep from losing sales in trials gone wrong, it is best to know what is already happening with your current site.
It is also helpful to understand how possible changes might impact performance. Research tools allow you to gather feedback from your users and analyse visitor behaviour so that you can make design decisions based on data, not guesswork. Some services also allow you to try out new designs and layouts before they ever go live on your site.
TryMyUI
Wouldn’t it be great if you could hear what users think as they engage with the content on your website? With TryMyUI, you can receive narrated videos of actual users trying to navigate your site and perform specific tasks you define. It will even allow you to run tests on prototypes whether they are fully functional or simply static mock-ups.
MouseStats
MouseStats gives you the ability to see what website visitors do when they visit. You can watch a playback of mouse movements, keyboard entries, scrolls, and clicks — a great chance to see what works on your site, and what doesn’t.
In a nutshell, it’s like having a video camera watching how your visitors move around your website. Heatmaps will provide you with invaluable data around where users are clicking or more importantly not clicking so you can tweak accordingly.
Design
Jumping straight from research to building or rebuilding your eCommerce website skips an important and deliberate step, design. If you want to create the very best customer experience that will lead to increased sales, it is essential to spend some time on the design too.
An excellent place to start is the creation of mock-ups and wireframes that can easily be adjusted and even tested before being put into action. The more complex the eCommerce site, the more time and energy you can save by investing in the design stage, so learn to appreciate the value of design.
UXPin makes creating prototypes as easy as dragging and dropping. The platform does a lot more than create static images of your design. It allows you to create interactive, dynamic mock-ups with features that work like the real thing. Another useful tool is Mockingbird which can help you put together a mock-up of your website fast.
The tool enables you to start sharing your ideas quickly and move to implementation faster. It also allows you to not only create mock-ups but link pages together for a more interactive testing experience.
Collaboration
In most cases, you are going to need some input or buy-in on any new designs. Collaboration tools make it faster and easier to share input and feedback before a site goes live. This means that you can make adjustments based on input on the fly and not wait until you have a functional website.
Red Pen is one of the most straightforward collaboration tools for wireframes and mock-ups. Users point and click on the element on which they wish to comment and then type their thoughts. Their comments show up in real-time for everyone else to see. Red Pen is a fast and straightforward way to get feedback.
Designed for nearly any type of creative visual design, Concept Inbox allows the designer and other team members to collaborate in real-time. It allows for visual feedback and stores all versions of the work. Designers can look back at the evolution of a design or even return to an earlier version at any time.
These are just a handful of eCommerce tools that can improve user experience and help boost your sales. But, if you think there is anything that we have missed or something you would like to share, please contact us at…