User Experience Ð - FitForCommerce · User Experience Ð Each and every interaction a shopper has...

User Experience–

Each and every interaction a shopper has with you is critical. The smallest changes to the user experience can have a significant impact on the individual shopper’s experience, and in the long term, your entire business.

User Experience | 38 © 2019

BURNING QUESTIONS

• What tools can help me measure my user experience?

• What areas should I focus on to optimize the user experience?

• How do speed and load times affect the user experience?

A great user experience can win a customer forever, but a lackluster experience can have a detrimental impact – the individual customer may never return, share negative experiences with families, friends and social media, discouraging potential customers to shop. An experience that exceeds expectations, on the other hand, can result in a satisfied and loyal customer who will not only come back, but will also send new customers your way.

TOOLS AND TRICKS OF THE TRADE

Most people associate user experience with design and user interfaces, but user experience is much more than that. It includes every interaction a customer has with an organization’s digital interfaces – including ecommerce sites, mobile apps and even in-store kiosks. And it includes every aspect of the experience – from site design and navigation, to features and functionality, checkout, all the way through to delivery and even post-purchase.

The most critical element of a good user experience is to meet the needs of the customers within a reasonable set of time, with no confusion, frustration or errors – essentially providing a “frictionless” experience, regardless of touchpoint.

There are two major aspects to user experience – the design, features and tools that create the experience and the tools to measure the performance and optimize the experience. Although much of the user experience work might fall under the responsibility of the design and development team(s), every member of an organization must consider the impact of every decision they make

DID YOU KNOW?

64 percent of online retailers reported

that optimizing the user experience (with

features like enhanced search, navigation,

product content and overall ease of use)

is one of their top priorities.20

CONTENT TOOLS

1. Design/Creative

2. Usability (primarily testing tools and methodologies)

3. Website Performance Optimization

4. Site Search/Navigation

5. Voice of the Customer (ratings, reviews, Q&A)

6. Personalization


about the user experience – that includes buyers, merchandisers, marketers, operations, fulfillment, and of course, designers and UX/UI employees.

Creative/Design – Form Follows Function

A brand’s visual brand identity – logo, color schemes, fonts, visuals – is extremely important. How organizations visually present themselves says a lot about who they are. But it is important to make a distinction between corporate/brand site design and ecommerce, as different rules apply. For ecommerce, in addition to telling the brand story, the primary function of the site is to sell.

When designing for ecommerce and other digital channels, retailers should start by fully understanding the target customers and how they shop. Demographics, socioeconomics, interests, shopping behaviors, etc., should impact the layout and design of digital interfaces. Merchandise assortment and types of products offered will also drive how the site looks and the kind of functionality needed to optimize the user experience. In addition, content, links, navigation, functionality and error handling may affect the design and need to be defined and approved before the creative look and feel is applied.

The Need for Speed

Some retailers use up to 50 third-party applications to provide richer user experiences – the industry average is 27. These applications are essential for engaging customers, but they also result in third-party violations (when applications take an extended time to load, fail to load, or block an entire page from loading completely) that can significantly sacrifice site performance and drive buyers to competing sites.22

OUR TAKE: Let “Personas” set the direction

Create User Personas to identify similar customer types and use these personas as guidelines when

designing your site. Understanding the demographics, motivations, goals, task flows, and desired

functionality of your customers will help you prioritize and improve site design.

OUR TAKE: Don’t Guess. Test.

On average only one out of four A/B split tests yield the expected results. So, if you’re not testing

everything, you’re off 75 percent of the time.21


With the implementation of a web/mobile optimization solution or ecommerce acceleration solution, retailers have full visibility into how third-party ecommerce applications impact the performance of their sites. These platforms provide control to reduce third-party violations, resulting in improved performance and, in some cases, as high as 10-20 percent conversion lift.23

Usability

Great usability of web, mobile, and other digital interfaces is necessary to succeed in today’s competitive market. If a site is difficult to use, if customers cannot find what they are looking for, or if the shopping process is too cumbersome, shoppers will quickly leave for a competitor. There are several tools that can help measure and optimize the usability of digital interfaces.

OPTIMIZING THE USER EXPERIENCE

• Conduct a site assessment with a UX expert to identify potential usability issues

• Evaluate analytics and create dashboards of customer-experience-related KPIs

• Conduct small user tests on key shopping paths and pages on your site

SEEN IN THE FIELD

Following the launch of their responsive site, Moosejaw,

a leading outdoor retailer, realized that its website

content was not optimized for mobile devices, resulting

in unacceptable mobile performance and load times.

Moosejaw deployed an optimization solution that

allowed Moosejaw to significantly accelerate website

loading and improve shopper experience. As a result,

Moosejaw was able to realize 20 percent desktop

growth and 50 percent mobile growth.

DID YOU KNOW?

Spending 10 percent of your development

budget on usability should improve your

conversion rate by 83 percent.24


• Conduct card sorting to identify ways to optimize product taxonomy

• Invest in A/B testing tools to test out theories and findings from assessment and user testing

Eye Tracking

Leveraging sensor technology, eye-tracking solutions are primarily used to identify where users are looking on a digital interface. Coupled with sophisticated algorithms, eye tracking can determine a user’s attention, focus, drowsiness, and other mental states. Retailers leverage this information to gain insights into consumer behaviors and to pinpoint usability issues.

Click Tracking

Click-tracking solutions provide the ability to monitor how users got to a site, where they click, and where they are not clicking. This includes scrolling and browsing behavior on a site or within a mobile application. The goal of click tracking is to identify usability issues and on-page behavior.

Card Sorting Exercise

Card sorting is a research technique for discovering how users understand and categorize information. Card sorting is typically used for insights into how to group and label website content in a way that makes most sense to the audience. Card sorting is particularly useful for building the structure of a site, deciding what content goes where, determining the navigation, and optimizing product taxonomy.

A/B Testing

A/B testing tools serve two different pages to learn which page performs better. Many content solutions already include tools to automate this process, and there are several web optimization tools that can be easily added to existing platforms.

Site Search/Navigation

Site search solutions bring contextualization techniques to search in order to better answer customer queries and deliver contextual promotions by changes to search algorithms and merchandise features. The more advanced solutions, however, go a step further, delivering contextual search results by taking into account behavioral, situational, and historical data.

DID YOU KNOW?

Faster search is the top priority for new

website features to deploy among US

distributors.25


Ratings and Reviews

Ratings and reviews provide customers with trusted feedback that helps them make informed purchase decisions. Ratings and reviews have become pretty much the norm – customers expect the ability to easily find reviews and recommendations from other customers when they shop. Most digital commerce platforms include basic reviews and ratings features. However, third-party providers can offer more advanced solutions that include social media integrations and Customer-Generated Q&A functionality.

Personalization

Personalization plays a significant role in optimizing the user experience. It is all about knowing who the customer is, and using that information to create a meaningful and relevant user experience, guided by what she wants and when she wants it. Every step along the shopping journey is an opportunity to connect and engage to strengthen the user experience and build a strong, personal relationship that drives sales and loyalty.

SEEN IN THE FIELD

The Container Store brings

customer ratings to the forefront

on the category page, allowing

shoppers to refine product listings

by ratings and includes ratings

for products on the page. The

company also allows shoppers to

sort by ratings.


Although many retailers try to replicate Amazon’s personalization approach, most do not have the resources (or data) available to build the same sophisticated features. There are, however, many options available that do not require costly in-house development. Using data analytics, supported by digital commerce platform capabilities and other best-of-breed personalization technologies, organizations can still provide contextually relevant experiences by delivering content that resonates with consumers.

DID YOU KNOW?

Next-gen personalization solutions leverage AI-driven engines that can process vastly more data than other

solutions and use sophisticated algorithms that predict individual shopper desire and intent in real time.

These solutions have proven to increase Revenue per Visit by over 10 percent in controlled experiments

against older personalization approaches.26

HomepagePersonalize based on arrival channel profile

Search / Category PagesBias search results,

personalize look and feel

Product PagesPersonalize recommendations,

target content and merchandising

LoyaltyPersonalize offers and communications,

loyalty program rewards

Add to CartUpsell, cross sell, personalize

promotions and offers

CheckoutRedeem offers, manage shipping,

billing and gifts


SPOTLIGHT ON DATA

Data is at the core of good user experiences. Retailers leverage data to design exceptional user experiences and rely on data to analyze and optimize user experiences across all customer touchpoints. When it comes to user experience, the core data challenge is less about the sheer volume of data, and more about the siloed nature of how data exists and is used. There are many different tools and measurement methods, each of which generates its own highly specific “bubble” of data that needs to be analyzed independently to be understood. Synthesizing it all into a holistic picture has simply been near-impossible. The good news is that a rapidly emerging new class of AI-driven tools shows great promise toward “seeing the forest for the trees.” This is especially evident in the area of personalization.

There are now quite a few personalization platforms that have surprisingly mature machine learning algorithms that can absorb disparate data from multiple systems and begin detecting patterns and relationships that help inform the content displayed at numerous customer journey touchpoints. As a result, all the user experience data collection tools can now directly feed a downstream system designed to produce the optimum experience tuned to each individual customer.

THIS REPORT IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY–

OUR MEDIA SPONSOR–

ChannelAdvisor has been on the front lines of e-commerce since 2001, helping retailers and brands connect with customers, optimize operations and grow sales channels. We’ve grown from a small company in a young industry to an industry leader at the forefront of a global revolution — with thousands of clients and billions of dollars in transactional revenue flowing through our platform every year. For more information, visit channeladvisor.com

Adweek is the leading source of news and insight serving the brand marketing ecosystem. First published in 1979, Adweek’s award-winning coverage reaches an engaged audience of more than 6 million professionals across platforms including print, digital, events, podcasts, newsletters, social media and mobile apps. As a touchstone of the advertising and marketing community, Adweek is an unparalleled resource for leaders across multiple industries who rely on its content to help them do their job better.

Adweek is part of the Beringer Capital portfolio that also includes BrandShop, a leading full-service partner that works with major consumer brands to employ digital commerce to increase sales, gain valuable consumer insight and create the type of end-to-end experiences that build loyalty and keep brands ahead of the competition. Learn more at adweek.com and brandshop.com

http://channeladvisor.com

http://www.adweek.com

http://www.brandshop.com

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FitForCommerce is a leading boutique consultancy that helps hundreds of online and multichannel brands and retailers make informed digital, ecommerce and omnichannel retail investment decisions. Leveraging years of experience, state-of-the-art tools, strategic diligence and tactical planning, FitForCommerce helps brands and retailers define strategies for growth, improve the customer experience, plan and hire the right organization, and find "best fit" technology solutions. | www.fitforcommerce.com

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