Designing For Retail: 4 Tips for UX Design

Face-to-face purchases are becoming a thing of the past day by day. 75% of buyers and sellers prefer digital channels, according to a McKinsey report. The US retail Ecommerce sales were $794.5 billion in 2020 and were expected to increase to $843.15 billion, according to eMarketer.

All of this points to the digital retail and eCommerce boom we are going through, and in there, user experience (UX) plays a vital role in enhancing the customer’s buying experience.

A Gartner study noted that 64% of customers value the buying experience over price, indicating the essence of UX for retail eCommerce. So what can one do to enhance the UX for eCommerce? Let’s find out.

UX Design Strategy For Retail

1. Keep It Mobile-First

Statista noted that 72.9% of ecommerce purchases came from a mobile device in 2021. Therefore, an enterprise UX must be mobile-first and web later.

Make sure your UX is a seamless, responsive mobile experience, and you are good to go. Easy-to-translate designs help you communicate with customers through visuals. Don’t forget to use graphics that are easily scalable across screen sizes.

2. Keeping It Quick

In Forbes’s ‘Science behind Tiktok’s success’ article, Dr. Julie Albert stated how when you are scrolling, and something catches your eye, a photo or a video, it gives you a dopamine hit in the pleasure center of the brain.

Now, it is important to understand that Tiktok does it with a 15-second video format. The attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, especially for the digital audience.

That dopamine hit we discussed also keeps the user on your website. On the retail front, you can leverage shorter attention spans with simple and quick navigation, features that do not require many steps and make the customer’s journey to purchase faster.

This can be achieved with a clear product page, hamburger menus, a call to action, and communication with graphics to make the purchase decision quick and easy.

The aim here is to shorten the customer journey and ensure they are not getting lost in the process. Even with the checkout, keep the process to the point without any distractions.

3. The customer is the King

With retail, customers should not feel that they are making a compromise since they are buying something online and not in-store. The responsibility of guiding customers through the buying process as smoothly as possible should be taken seriously.

Some of the ways to achieve that are as below:

• Effective Indicators Wherever Necessary

Product page descriptions, CTA buttons, error messages, and pop-ups. UX writing can prove to be an effective way to communicate with your customers, and it will create seamless interaction points without frustrating them. They will know where they can find what they are looking for, whether a product or a feature.

• Targeting Every Demographic

Compared to the last decade, elderly internet users are increasing, and they need to be considered while creating a UX for your retail. Recreating the UX for a different generation will bring in different challenges. For example, with certain demographics, you may need to remove the hamburger menu and icons and put long text descriptions to make the user experience seamless.

4. Getting The Help From Technology

For enterprise scales, tech companies have been building UX design tools for a long time. Artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions can help enterprises create better UX for the retail industries with the help of AI/ML.

UX designers today leverage smart tools for creating smarter UX systems that track user behaviors and use that data to deliver personalized user and customer experiences. A simple chatbot on the web pages is the most basic example of this.

According to SuperOffice, customers are likely to buy more when they are offered live chat support. The automated chatbots can make customers feel ‘supported’ in real-time so they stay on your site. TridhyaTech’s eCommerce solutions can help you leverage future-ready technologies for better customer experience and engagement while staying true to your UX concepts.

Conclusion

With more and more people boarding the train of online shopping, UX designing for retail is shaping up to be an important aspect for enterprises. Keeping up with changing audiences and trends can feel overwhelming, but getting your basics in place can take you a long way.

For starters, keeping your sites mobile-friendly and creating a short customer journey will help you drive more engagement. Making sure you are serving your customers the way they want with personalization will also add to a successful UX design solution. Last but not least, technology can help you immensely with driving your customers to conversion with artificial intelligence and machine learning.