Don’t underestimate the purchasing power of mobile users. While this kind of audience has traditionally had lower conversion rates than desktop users, today’s eCommerce shoppers have changed the game. With the rise of smartphones and tablets, optimizing your eCommerce mobile design is crucial for capturing this growing market segment.
Now, it’s easier to access a website to find information and products from a smartphone. Your potential customers can be everywhere:
- standing in line;
- waiting in traffic;
- walking on the street and suddenly wanting to buy something.
Your task is to retain them on the page. How should you ensure they don’t ditch your website or app? You need to create or optimize it with mobile UX peculiarities in mind.
As mobile shoppers are time-pressed, there are certain rules applicable to mobile UX optimization that cover:
- streamlining navigation;
- choosing convenient button placement;
- utilizing device features, and so on.
In this guide, we’ll look at UX/UI design for mobile commerce. We’ll analyze well-known brands and how they manage to win over smartphone users and convert them into buyers.
Why Is Mobile UX/UI Important for eCommerce Sites?
Briefly, mobile UX/UI involves optimizing your site to look good and work properly on all mobile devices, regardless of screen size. It’s about making your store’s pages attractive to appear high in the SERP and be a blast to use for those who access the website from their smartphones.
Many companies need to pay more attention to the importance of a mobile-friendly website, which benefits businesses. Just think about how many clients you can lose if your store doesn’t provide a decent shopping experience to mobile purchasers.
With mobile commerce on the rise, as an eCommerce business owner, you should give mobile leads more attention than before. You need reliable solutions to sustain communication with the audience and create the best eCommerce mobile design. And if you feel like the store is far from mobile-friendly, you need to hire an experienced UI/UX developer.
Key Points to Consider When Developing an eCommerce Mobile UX/UI Strategy
Now that you know why mobile design is so important, it’s time to start adapting your site. How do you ensure that the mobile UI/UX along the buyer’s journey is attractive, intuitive, engaging, and friction-free? Let’s take a look at five mobile design tips for improving your online retail store’s strategy and some design examples to learn from.
1. Putting Buttons in the Thumb Zone- eCommerce Mobile Design
The proper usage of screen space is crucial for mobile websites. The reason is that smartphones have a smaller viewport than desktops. You need to place all the essential elements without overloading the page.
For example, if you have a call-to-action button at the bottom of your screen, make sure it’s easy for users to tap on it with their thumbs. Reduce the amount of scrolling required and keep the most critical content on your page near the top.
Another great way to encourage user engagement is by providing ample space between elements. It allows users to navigate each piece without tapping on the wrong links.
It’s crucial to place icons within comfortable reach, i.e., in the thumb-friendly zone. It’s the screen area that can be easily accessed with the thumb while holding the smartphone in the same hand.
As most people hold cellphones in their right hand, the thumb-friendly zone is the bottom left or right corners and the centre of the screen. Make sure that this screen part contains all critical components. You can use the rest of the space (the upper left and lower right corners) for positioning other, less essential items.
Simply said, the main point is that many individuals won’t even try to get something if it is difficult to access. You can put various buttons within the mentioned zone depending on your business and goals.
Some of the most needed ones include:
- Proceed to the home page;
- Add to the shopping cart;
- Add to the wish list;
- Access the account
- Open navigation.
Below is an example of an online store by Subash Chandra. The most widely used buttons appear at the bottom of the screen, enhancing the overall mobile shopping experience.
2. Getting Access to Device Features
One of the main differences between computers and mobile phones is the abundance of device-specific features. You can take your store to the next level with a fast smartphone camera or GPS access. Here is what an online store may offer with the help of a camera:
- AR/VR: Masks and filters can bring about even more than creating a sense of a different environment. For instance, some companies already use this feature in an advanced manner: virtual try-on. The feature’s benefits are undeniable. Without having access to physical testers, users can apply products and make purchase decisions easier.
- Visual search: This functionality lets users upload or take a photo so that the system will find similar items in the store.
- Barcode scanning: It’s the ability to open the needed product page by reading a price tag in a store.
Other features require different functionality, for example:
- Location tracking: asking for the current device location to automatically fill in the address field during checkout or to provide the closest offline store for order pickup;
- Mobile payment systems (such as Apple, Samsung, and Google Pay): streamlining the ordering process with the help of in-built services;
- Voice search: employing a microphone to find the needed product without typing the request;
- Push notifications: communicating with potential customers via reminders about abandoned shopping carts, deals, and exclusive offers, which appear on the phone’s screen.
The Christopher Cloos website allows you to try eyewear before buying it. The store asks permission to open your camera and applies the chosen product on your screen once you enable it.
3. Ensuring a Minimalist Design- eCommerce Mobile Design
Making a complicated eCommerce UX design is a significant error many businesses make, so declutter your interface. User-friendliness is one of the most crucial factors when building mobile websites. Your clients will appreciate the ease of use and navigation that comes with simplicity, ordering more products from the store. Thus, keep in mind the following:
- Ensure that the key navigational components are easily accessible.
- Avoid requiring your clients to scroll horizontally.
- Create selection buttons big enough to use without having to zoom in.
- Consider accessibility requirements to satisfy users with impaired vision or other limitations.
- Put all the needed information upfront.
- Utilize buttons to specify the areas where customers can click.
- Think about adding drop-down menus.
- Add mobile-specific features, including click-to-call buttons.
- Keep the language, colours, and overall design simple and easy to read.
Check whether your website contains the following issues and remove them:
- an excessive amount of content;
- distracting colours;
- a confusing layout;
- hidden buttons;
- information that is hard to find.
By doing this, you improve the mobile shopping experience. Because if you overwhelm your buyers, they will abandon your product, leading to an instant failed sale. Or they will have to switch to a desktop computer, lowering the chances of making a purchase.
The best ways to get a minimalist look include:
- plain colour schemes;
- single typeface usage;
- keeping spaces in mind, etc.
Patagonia has a wonderful minimalistic website design, which you can check in the screenshots below.
4. Following the Three-Tap Rule- eCommerce Mobile Design
Another m-commerce best practice is to use the three-tap rule. It means a consumer should only have to tap a screen three times to access the desired page or product. For example, you can group products into sub-categories and further into categories in the navigation menu. You can also consider the seasons and organize specific sections, such as Christmas gifts or Father’s Day ideas.
Remember to include the on-site search bar to enable consumers to find the goods they’re looking for quickly. Consider using smart search to offer even better functionality. It involves presenting several possibilities and suggestions when visitors input the first few letters. You can show some hot picks, complete the request, and save users time while improving their buyer journey. The bottom line is the fewer steps the store requires, the better.
Look at the screenshot below with the example of a smart search. The Soko Glam website can autocomplete the phrase and present various categories and goods.
5. Organizing Shopping Cart & Checkout
Complicated checkout is one of the most popular conversion killers at the final stage of the purchase journey. Such pages contain too many unnecessary fields, asking for too much information.
To reduce customer irritation, streamline the shopping cart and checkout process. Allow clients to edit the shopping cart items by changing their quantity, colour, size, etc. If someone wants to save the product for later, include the wish list option to remember their choice. Tips for organizing checkout are as follows:
- Limit the number of form fields or consider enabling a guest checkout option or signing in via social accounts.
- Allow turning on and off of visibility for password fields.
- Give users access to the appropriate keyboard, which means a numbers block when they need to enter a number.
- Let clients scan their credit cards to fill in the information automatically.
- Make mobile payment systems like Apple Pay and Google Pay available.
- Use a one-page checkout, or if you can’t, specify the user’s position in the process.
- Remember the previously entered data in case of page reloading due to a mistake.
- Utilize social proof and trust seals as markers of credibility.
To Sum Up eCommerce Mobile Design
M-commerce, an app-like UX/UI, a mobile-first approach, or whatever you want to call it, is becoming the next frontier in eCommerce. As of the third quarter of 2021, 30.6% of consumers bought something from their mobile phones once a week worldwide.
With mobile phones and tablets now taking up an increasingly large portion of our lives, it makes sense that consumers start purchasing through these devices as well. In this article, we’ve discussed m-commerce, how it works, and why retailers should consider adopting this new model for their businesses.
We’ve put together a list of five tips and examples to help you improve your mobile eCommerce site and increase conversions. The tips cover everything from optimizing navigation for smaller screens, putting crucial elements at the bottom of the screen, and simplifying the checkout process. Make your site more responsive and turn smartphone shoppers into buyers.
About the Author
Kate Parish
Kate Parish is the CMO at Onilab, a web development agency. Being a top executive in a company specializing in eCommerce, she spends much time researching new approaches in UX/UI design, Magento PWA development, and headless commerce on the whole. At the same time, Kate strives to keep up with the latest developments in digital marketing to modify the company’s promotional strategy accordingly. Her primary areas of interest are SEO, branding, and SMM.
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