Ecommerce Articles & Videos

  • User Intent Affects Filter Design

    Results pages that refresh too soon or shift the page position disrupt the filtering process. Design filters and facets to offer a smooth user experience.

  • Everything I Needed to Know About Good User Experience I Learned While Working in Restaurants

    Satisfying user experiences are built on good customer-service principles. Restaurant UX provides many lessons for interaction design.

  • Don't Force Users to Register Before They Can Buy

    Optional registration on e-commerce sites simplifies the purchase process and invites users to register when they feel comfortable, rather than forcing unwanted registration.

  • 3 Tips for Better Product Descriptions on Websites

    Key content requirements for product pages are: answer users’ questions, be direct, and help with product comparison.

  • Decision Making in the Ecommerce Shopping Cart: 4 Tips for Supporting Users

    Enable decision-making in the shopping cart by providing product detail, allowing access to product pages and letting users easily delete items.

  • Mobile Navigation: Image Grids or Text Lists?

    For mobile navigation, image grids should be saved for deeper IA levels where visual differentiation between menu items is critical.

  • Designing for 5 Types of E-Commerce Shoppers

    Considering e-commerce shoppers’ motivations and habits when they come to a site can help designers make decisions that improve overall site usability while supporting users’ needs.

  • Infinite Scrolling Is Not for Every Website

    Endless scrolling saves people from having to attend to the mechanics of pagination in browsing tasks, but is not a good choice for websites that support goal-oriented finding tasks.

  • Ecommerce UX: 3 Design Trends to Follow and 3 to Avoid

    Ecommerce designs benefit from large product images, robust reviews and easy discounts, but suffer from hidden product detail, poor site feedback, and crowded customer-service areas.

  • Maps and Location Finders on Mobile Devices

    Maps of business locations may be more visually appealing than a simple list view, but they introduce too many usability issues on mobile devices.

  • State the Price to Give B2B Sites a Competitive Advantage

    Prospective customers want to know the price as their #1 info need on any website — including B2B sites, but these sites often hide or obscure pricing information.

  • Conversion Rates

    Increased conversion is one of the strongest ROI arguments for better user experience and more user research. Track over time, because it's a relative metric.

  • HealthCare.gov’s Account Setup: 10 Broken Usability Guidelines

    HealthCare.gov’s account setup process is unnecessarily complex and may have contributed to backend technology failures.

  • Users' Pagination Preferences and "View All"

    Long listings might need pagination by default, but if users customize the display to View All list items, respect that preference.

  • Ecommerce Usability Improvements

    Sites have improved, and we now know much more about e-tailing usability. Today, poor content is the main cause of user failure.

  • How to Achieve Painless Registration (at asktog.com)

    I'm about to give you a number of ways to increase sales on ecommerce sites and increase sign-ups on service sites, but first, raise your hand if you personally, when surfing the web, enjoy registering to use a site.

  • Transactional Email and Confirmation Messages

    Automated email can improve customer service, strengthen relationships, and help websites bypass search engines. But most messages fared poorly in user testing and didn't fulfill this potential.

  • Does User Annoyance Matter?

    Making users suffer a drop-down menu to enter state abbreviations is one of many small annoyances that add up to a less efficient, less pleasant user experience. It's worth fixing as many of these usability irritants as you can.

  • 10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities

    Several usability findings lead directly to higher sales and increased customer loyalty. These design tactics should be your first priority when updating your website.

  • Wishlists, Gift Certificates, and Gift Giving in E-Commerce

    Although gift features leverage the online medium and draw new users to a site, they also introduce many usability pitfalls. Among them are poorly designed email notifications, which many users simply ignore.