A recent User Experience Survey Report by E-consultancy showed that up to 74% of businesses believe user experience is important for boosting sales and conversions. It’s a simple fact that no matter how brilliant your product may be, poor user experience due to bad design is a major obstacle to converting visitors to loyal buyers.
In my role as Head of Digital Strategy at Jiggle Digital I work with the design team and look at ways to improve design and optimization that is focused on improving user experience. It can transform the results of a business. Here are some well known brands that increased their sales and conversions through strategic site redesign:
Take advantage of the mobile consumer
Global mobile usage has reached its tipping point, with 80% of internet users owning a mobile device such as a smartphone or a tablet. More importantly, the large majority of consumers are ‘multiscreening’—using different devices to access retail sites. This makes it necessary to optimize your site to support different devices including smartphones, tablets and desktop.
Example: O’Neill Clothing, improved its mobile conversion rates by 65.71%, transaction rates increased by 112.5% while revenue went up by 101.25% when they adopted a responsive design for their website. Some of the improved design elements included collapsing the navigation menu, increasing the size of the photos, tap areas and font, and reducing the number of columns.
Make it easy for customers to navigate
Navigation is a key element of user experience. The ease of website navigation also significantly affects conversions and sales. If visitors are having a hard time moving along on your website, you can bet they will not stay there longer than two minutes. Good design facilitates excellent visitor flow—it makes it easy for visitors to find information, to understand the information and to act on it immediately.
Example: Zen Windows, a provider of customized window solutions redesigned its website flow to make it easier for visitors to find products and to checkout. These changes boosted the conversion rates from 0.75% to 2.95%.
Enable visitors to trust you
Think about it: The last time you visited a website that was difficult to navigate or had a poor layout, did you leave immediately or did you go ahead and buy something there? You probably left because the site did not look trustworthy.
A site that is well designed not only boosts usability; it also instills a sense of trust, which in turn facilitates the conversion process from browser to buyer. Various design elements can increase customers’ trust e.g. using friendly images that communicate the value of your product, adding reviews and testimonials widgets, using color consistently, or adding an authentication seal.
Example: Hawk Host, a web-hosting provider changed their homepage by replacing the image of a globe with a padlock, which symbolized safety. A split test showed that the new homepage with the padlock image converted 2-3 times better than the control homepage with the globe.
Reduce shopping cart abandonment
Did you know that up to 68% of online shopping carts are abandoned each year and that businesses are losing massive amounts of money through abandoned charts? Conversion-focused design can reduce cart abandonment rates by reducing customer anxieties, making the payments process safer and simplifying the checkout path.
Example: The Institute for Individual Investors had an abandonment rate of 80%. They redesigned their web checkout form and split tested three versions of the form. The redesign process included adding a customer support widget, reducing the form to two columns, and aligning labels and text fields. These changes reduced the abandonment rate down to 54%.
Increase visitor engagement
Visitor engagement can be measured using different metrics such as visitor flow, time spent on filling out forms, time spent on each page etc. Overall, visitor engagement affects conversions; high visitor engagement allows users to complete the checkout process.
Low visitor engagement can be attributed to poor design, which creates plenty of roadblocks that keep visitors from completing the checkout process. Complex forms, incoherent navigation, lack of a clear calls to action, too many entry and exit pages all result from poor design, which leads to lower engagement levels.
Example: The UK Tool Center was able to boost visitor engagement by 27% by removing an extra product filter that distracted visitors and kept them from purchasing any product.
Improve your value proposition
Sometimes, when I consult with businesses with a great product they assume that the product will sell itself. In most cases this is very wrong. As such, you end up with a good product and a wishy-washy website that fails to highlight the true value of the product. Without a strong value proposition, even the best product will not convert as well as it should.
A conversion-focused design will narrow down the best, most compelling features of your product and capture visitors’ attention with the right layout, color, background, call to action and the use of persuasive design techniques such as encapsulation, directional cues, and contrast.
Example: Sims 3, a popular computer games franchise had an incredibly cluttered website that failed to get people to register to access games. Their redesigned website included a change of background, a simpler homepage, a clean list of the benefits of signing up and a bright, visible call to action for registration. The new homepage attracted a 128% increase in registration.
User Innovation
Product innovation alone is not enough to convert browsers into buyers. User experience innovation is the invincible force that creates a sense of trust among visitors, boosts website flow, increases visitor engagement and eventually facilitates conversions, sales and revenue generation. If you are not seeing the results you hoped for, get a website consultation and see how your online presence can be improved.
Do you feel that your current website is hurting your business?
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Andrew Spence.