When building an ecommerce site, getting too absorbed in your own requirements is very easy. However, one must always keep the requirements of the end-user in mind. What are these? That your ecommerce site be easy and enjoyable to use. As with offline stores, a good shopping experience guaranties repeat customers. Use the following tips to improve your customer’s experience on your ecommerce site:
Reduce Clutter
Clutter in this case means more than simply having too many objects on a page. It also includes anything that distracts or obstructs the visitor from finding what he wants. Make the important items more prominent in your page design. Fancy backgrounds, graphics, extraneous images, and technical effects serve to hide the important items. Placing too many items for sale on a page has a similar distracting effect.
Keep the colors on a page down to a minimum of about two or three. You should also make the page more easily scanned through effective use of white space. Separate the elements that make up the layout of the page with plenty of white space.
Make Your Site Easy To Navigate
There is more to easy navigation than providing a navigation bar. Easy navigation includes structuring and organizing your site so that it’s easily understood by your visitors. Place your navigation bar in areas where the user expects it such as at the top or sides of the page. Make sure to word the links in the navigation bar with simple and obvious terms. Use breadcrumb navigation to give the user a better sense of their whereabouts on your site.
Label Your Web Forms Above The Input Field
When the human eye scans, it first moves vertically down from the top. Then it moves from left to right. Make your forms easier to use by taking advantage of this natural tendency. This means placing the label for an input field directly above the field and not to its left. This not only helps the visitor, but also uses less of the page’s limited horizontal space.
Place Your Important Content Above The Fold
The “above the fold” section is the top part of a web page that the visitor first sees when landing on your site. If the visitor must scroll to view something, then it is not above the fold. Most people rarely view content further down the page. This is why you should place your key content above the fold. Don’t try to place everything there because that makes the area cluttered.
Designing an ecommerce site for usability benefits both the visitor and site owner. For information on ecommerce site design and its hosting, please contact us.
Photo by melenita2012