8 Magento UX and UI Practices To Increase Customer Conversions
Magento Open Source / Adobe Commerce is one of the most flexible and powerful commerce platforms available. It doesn’t matter if your business is B2B or B2C, to truly maximize your conversions, careful attention must be given to user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design. This article provides eight best practices that, if executed correctly, guarantee increased conversions for your business.
4 Methods To Improve Magento UX
User experience, also called “customer experience” (CX), strategy involves devising the shortest paths to satisfying a customer’s needs. That means, that from the moment the customer first interacts with your brand, their path to complete a specific conversion goal is smooth and rewarding. Since most businesses have different types of customers with different goals, a good UX should accommodate all of them to some degree. The UX process identifies these customer types and creates compelling journeys that deliver them to their conversion goal. These goals can include:
- Purchasing a product
- Submitting a form
- Downloading a document or app
- Locating a physical store
- Etc.
Magento has spent millions of dollars baking UX best practices into their platform and allowing store owners the flexibility to customize the customer experience to fit business needs. This customization can take place on the front end — the pages the customer sees — or the back end, with functionality that assists conversion decisions.
Following are some key practices you can employ to maximize your website's UX:
1. Choose the Best Magento Template
A prebuilt template is one of the quickest ways to get your business online. When selecting the base template, spend some time mapping the template pages to your business type. Matching key website pages, like the home page, category, product page, etc., will ensure that, right out of the box, your website will have the right layout and functionality for your customers.
2. Work With Your UX Expert To Identify Customer Journeys
Your marketing and business development staff have an important role in educating your UX designer on the products, services, customers and customer pain points. When in doubt, lean on them for design advice!
3. Identify All Your Conversion Goals
A typical website should have multiple conversion goals. Make sure these goals are prioritized by importance to the business. Your UX strategy will map appropriate calls to action (CTAs) to the Magento pages. This process may involve customizing the website pages in layout, content and functionality to optimize conversions.
4. Remember UX Never Stops
A best-practices UX strategy continues post-website launch. Key segments of the customer journey should be tagged and analyzed to sharpen their effectiveness. Remember that even a 1% improvement in conversions could mean increased ROI.
4 Methods To Improve Magento UI
User Interface design (UI) involves crafting the visual look of your website. Studies show that online shoppers are sophisticated and can identify a poorly designed website in less than a second. You can have carefully planned customer journeys, but if your website doesn’t grab the customer’s interest visually, they will potentially click off your site and onto one of your competitor’s.
Following are some key practices you can employ to maximize your website's UI:
1. Inject Your Brand Into Your E-commerce Site
Your brand consists of your logo, fonts, color palette, graphics and even the language you use. Usually, your brand is encapsulated in your brand style guide. Your UI designer will use this to help visually differentiate your website from the competition. Your products and services will become more credible and memorable when supported by a strong, consistent brand across your website and other communication channels.
2. Apply Your Brand Strategically
It’s not enough to slap the brand logo and colors onto an e-commerce template and call it a day. In order to create a richer, more sophisticated impression in the eyes of your customers, your UI designer should study your customer personas and create an appealing visual experience. The trick is to reach the right balance between the brand presence and the conversion journey.
3. Create Pages With Marketing in Mind
Marketers want flexible templates to promote products and services. Adobe Commerce’s Page Builder helps marketers to create content-rich landing pages using prebuilt, drag-and-drop controls. Your UI designer should work with your marketing team to create page layouts and promotional banner components that can be easily replicated within Page Builder, updated with new graphics and applied to a variety of page templates. This practice will give your marketing team a broad palette to promote products in-house, without the need for technical development.
4. Think Beyond Products
Once you have crafted a best-practices product catalog, product pages and checkout process, it’s time to enrich your customer experience with additional content pages. Your business type and customer personas can dictate other supporting pages to help drive conversions. These pages can include:
- Blogs and articles
- Case studies
- Landing pages
- Product and service videos
- Gamification
- Loyalty programs
- Influencer and User-Generated-Content (UGC)
- Personalized content based on user types
These types of pages are ideal for increased branding and differentiation. Not only will these content areas allow for more engagement with your customers, but the extra SEO juice they provide will also boost your organic search engine rankings.
While the rest of your e-commerce team is working to establish the product data and backend functionality, by using the UX and UI methods outlined above, your design team can create a branded, compelling, user-friendly customer experience that will drive conversions for your business.