When you’re launching an online business, your website is your most important asset. It’s the marketing tool that consumers use to learn about your products or services, as well as the sales channel they ultimately use to make a purchase.
Naturally, the way your website functions can have a drastic impact on how consumers interact with your brand. If the functionality of the design is strong, then potential customers will stick around to learn more about what you have to offer.
However, if your user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design fall by the wayside, your bounce rate can be massive and your e-commerce business will struggle to expand.
Let’s explore the importance of UX and UI design and how it affects the growth of small businesses online as well as some other advantages to certain UX/UI design principles and regulations.
Website Design Is Key to Strong Engagement
A website experience can make or break a lead capture or sale. Imagine entering a website with confusing navigation, broken buttons, or barely-legible font.
Even if you want to fill out a form or make a purchase, you may not be able to. Poor UX and UI design hinder engagement by making it difficult, frustrating, or impossible for consumers to get the information they need to move forward in the sales process.
On the flip side, excellent UX and UI design make the website experience feel seamless. Website visitors can easily flow through the pages of your website, and both your visual and written e-commerce content appears correctly on every device.
When your potential clients are consistently able to achieve their goals on your website, they’ll stay on your website longer and interact more with your store.
As a result, you can greatly increase your customer acquisitions and speed up your lead generation. Not only that, you will increase conversions and thus revenue. It’s all one virtuous cycle that can lead to more diverse customers and in turn more revenue and around the cycle goes.
UX/UI Design Supports Website Accessibility
Excellent UX and UI design can attract more members of your target audience, including people with disabilities — a group that accounts for millions of people in the United States alone.
Many of the design principles supported by professionals and educators naturally make it easier for everyone to navigate your website. For example, when your text and background have contrasting colors, which is ideal for UI design, people with color blindness can more easily read your content.
Following accessibility standards can improve your UX/UI design, too. Offering resizable text, for instance, can help people with vision impairments, but it also empowers all website visitors to optimize their user experience for their own devices and preferences.
Not only does this improve the experience for your clients and site visitors, but it’s the ethical thing to do. No business wants to have “that site,” the one that’s impossible to navigate or that ignores the color blind or the hearing impaired.
When your site does that, those communities communicate with each other. Advocacy is strong, and you want to be part of the advocacy, not its target.
Pairing UX Design With Social Proof
The majority of consumers read reviews before making a purchase decision, making reviews an essential part of the shopping experience. However, jumping between your website, search engines, and online review platforms can be a hassle.
When you make social proof part of your UX design — for example, by integrating an online review tool on each of your product pages — you can make your e-commerce store much more efficient and helpful.
When your customers see positive reviews about your products or services directly on your site, they’re more likely to gain trust in your business and make purchase decisions faster.
Listening to customer feedback from online reviews, social media, and even chatbots can further help you refine your UX/UI design.
If you receive any negative feedback about your e-commerce interactions (especially recurring criticisms), you can make changes to ensure the customer journey is as smooth as possible. These incremental improvements are key to small business growth.
Use Data to Shape Your UX/UI Design
Data mining, which is the process of finding patterns and trends within large batches of data, can be a powerful tool for your UX/UI design efforts. While customers don’t always provide feedback on their own, data mining can help you identify customer needs, so you can proactively improve your UX/UI design before complaints start rolling in.
If you’re collecting an abundance of website data through Google Analytics, data mining can help you identify how shoppers move through your website.
You can learn what drives them forward (like CTA buttons or product recommendations) and what causes them to leave (like long checkout processes). As a result, you can refine your UX/UI design to ensure website visitors follow your ideal customer journey map, which can end with a purchase.
By implementing continual data mining, your business can anticipate potential problems and future-proof its e-commerce functionality and usability. You can also glean other marketing insights from your customers, not just insights about their functional interaction with your site.
How many times did this visitor go back to that page of tank tops? Offer them a discount on summer clothing. Did a visitor spend a long time reading a white paper on how to load their own ammo? Send that visitor a link to try out an in-person class on ammo loading.
There are more customer insights to be found when data mining than just how you shape your UX and UI. And even these can help with site design.
Enhance Your Website to Achieve Business Growth
E-commerce has a promising future for small businesses, but if you want to grow your company through online sales, you need to optimize your shopping experience. When you achieve great UX/UI design, you can create more intuitive, accessible, and enjoyable experiences that drive purchases and garner customer loyalty.
