Imagine how happy you'd be to make your first cup of coffee with the high-end machine you just bought. Or what it's like to drive a high-end car. Or the pleasure of using your favorite mobile app that lets you get to everything you need with just a few clicks.   All of these things make you happy for the same reason: they all have great UX design. The way the UX design is shaped, structured, and carried out has a direct effect on how easy and fun it is to use a certain physical product or digital service, look around an online store, or choose one platform over another for your business needs.   Today, we'll slowly go into detail about what UX design is, why it's so important, and what 2021 trends you might want to add to your Shopify store.  

UX Design

A Glossary Of Definitions

  UX Design stands for "user experience." It's a term for the process of "designing" how customers interact with a product, whether it's digital or physical.    UX design is a complicated mix of many things, such as structure, efficiency, UI design, usability, problem-solving, marketing, and many more.    The main goal of UX design is to make sure that users have a pleasant, logical, and useful experience.    There are a lot of definitions of UX design on the Internet, but there isn't a single one that everyone agrees on. So, we've put together a list of some of the most beautiful ones that capture the essence of this craft.    You can see that UX is more than just how interactive something is or how the final UI (User Interface) looks. It's a process that starts with a deep understanding of the product, moves on to complex shaping and wireframing, and ends with how users actually use the product.    In the digital world of today, good UX design is so important that a business probably won't do well without it.    This is true for at least a thousand reasons. 

Users have problems. Lots of problems. Businesses are the solution. UX ensures that we solve these problems flawlessly.  Daniel Dungyov - Design Advocate at Friends of Figma, Sofia | UX Designer | Visual Designer

 

UX design is the art and science of generating positive emotions among people who interact with products or services.  Tomer Sharon - Managing Director, Head of User Research and Metrics at Goldman Sachs | Author of Validating Product Ideas through Lean User Research 

 

UX design is an empathically-driven practice crafted to solve human and business problems, and remove obstacles and friction from a user’s desired goals — hopefully delivering delight in the process.  Jason Ogle - Founder and host of the User Defenders podcast 

 

User experience (UX) design is the process design teams use to create products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. This involves the design of the entire process of acquiring and integrating the product, including aspects of branding, design, usability and function.  Interaction Design Foundation 

 

UX design is the purposeful application of logic and rationale for creating experiences that offer both utility and value to the end user. It's a process of deeply understanding the user's needs and objectives, identifying where their greatest problems exist, and working generatively to ideate ways to solve these problems. Rarely centered on the creation of a single screen, UX design is instead the intentional act of crafting countless interactions that span the entire user journey within a given product experience while also adhering to brand, design and usability standards.  Scott Johnsen - Head of Design at Alto 

  You can see that UX is more than just how interactive something is or how the final UI (User Interface) looks. It's a process that starts with a deep understanding of the product, moves on to complex shaping and wireframing, and ends with how users actually use the product.    In the digital world of today, good UX design is so important that a business probably won't do well without it.    This is true for at least a thousand reasons.   

Why UX design is important?

  Everything we've talked about so far has made it clear that UX design is the tool every product needs to do well in the market. We like to say that the happiness our customers feel when using our product (or storefront) is a must. And a must for the success of any business.    We've talked a lot about how the look and performance of your store affect your conversion rate. Now that you know how important UX design is to the structure and UI (user interface) of your Shopify store, let's look at some real data about how much UX affects the success of your e-commerce business.    According to a thorough study on the ROI of UX, bad UX causes $1,420,300,000,000 in lost online sales, while $5,478,300,000,000 is what e-commerce sales are expected to be in 2020.    Pretty scary, right?    E-commerce is getting stronger and stronger, and it is here to stay. Its profits around the world show how tough the competition is. Users want to have great experiences on the web, and our community of ambitious store owners, developers, and designers are in charge of how brands and products are shown to the huge online community.    Now that that's out of the way, let's look at the UX trends that will continue to grow in 2021 and give users great experiences with real value.   

1. Automations & Chatbots

Chatbots have been around for a while and are now so common that users expect to find them on every website they visit. These AI-powered friends can make online stores much more interactive overall. Over the past few years, UX designers have seen how powerful automated responses are, and they are already adding more and more features to chatbots.    Most of the time, chatbots are used in e-commerce to: 

• Answers to the most common questions (thus saving lots of time and money that should otherwise be invested in a customer support team) 
• Recommending products based on where the customer has been 
• Providing help with the checkout process 
• Making sure that customers can find what they want quickly and easily 

  Without a doubt, chatbots can have a big effect on the user experience by making the main tasks in an online store easier and automating them. Still, with just the basics, this functionality is far from being limited in what it can do.    Here are some creative ways to use chatbots in 2021 to improve your store and how your customers interact with it: 

• Use smart and quick quizzes to help your prospects find the right products for them. 
• To come up with a unique upsell strategy, look at related products for each item added to the cart. 
• Use automation to make the user journey as personalized as possible.

    Source: Mind Heros  

2. Quizzes

  We won't be overstating things if we say that quiz development has reached its pinnacle. A lot of online fashion, health, and beauty stores have already tested the power of quizzes to personalize messages and make specific product suggestions, and they keep proving it.    The seamless, custom-tailored UX design of 2021 must ensure customer-focused websites that guide buyers through the buying process by showing them the best product for their needs and wants.    Here are some ideas for how to use quizzes to increase your conversions, improve your UX design, and get your leads excited:   

• Include related, valuable content to your quiz. 

Try putting in short pieces of content like the results of a survey, interesting facts about the products, or quotes that answer specific questions. This will give your quiz a lot of value and make it stand out from the rest.   

• Add customer reviews and testimonials. 

We all know how important reviews are to buying decisions and how important it is for each brand to give its loyal fans a chance to say how great a product is. Use the quiz's interactive features to add some reviews. Trust us, this plan will surprise you with how well it works.   

• Put yourself in the shoes of your customers first. 

You can make a quiz in a few different ways: you can add it to your chat, you can make a beautiful page for it, or you can work on a few different quizzes at the same time. As with anything else in marketing and design, you should start by thinking about your target audience, how they act, and what they expect from you before you decide what to do with your quiz.   If your ideal buyer is a busy working mom who doesn't have much time, choose an option that saves time and gives accurate results right away. On the other hand, if your audience wants more information about your products, you should focus on making a more complicated quiz with a lot of content. This will meet their needs and build the credibility of your brand.   

• Create an impressive UI design for your quiz. 

We've already said that quizzes are common. If you want to stand out from your competitors and offer a better unique selling point, you need to put money into a beautiful quiz design. Trust UX/UI professionals who have been checked out and let them use their creativity to add shapes, images, gradients, fonts, and anything else that will make your quiz look good.   Source: Natur-all  

3. Cart Drawers

  Cart Drawers are slowly taking the place of the old-fashioned cart pages. If you haven't already, this UX trend is probably the best choice for your e-commerce store, as it has great benefits for both you as the store owner and your online customers.    This feature is a smart way to replace the cart page with an optimized popup that usually appears on the right side of the screen and shows the items that have been added to the cart without the visitor having to leave the product page they are on.    Since UX design always starts with the user in mind, let's first look at how to cart drawers improve the user experience: 

• Users can see right away that what they wanted to do (like add a certain product to their cart) was done quickly and correctly.
• Users can keep looking around the store for other products.
• It's very easy to add and remove items, and the user can do it while looking at the product pages (e.g. I add a product, keep on looking, find another one that I like better, add it and then immediately remove the first one without any hustle)
• Users can easily compare products, their features, and their prices because the product page shows all the products the user has added together.
• Users can easily change the number of items they've bought or get rid of them with just one click.
• Users can go straight to checkout

  Tip:     Keep in mind that when users go back from the final checkout page, Shopify sends them to the cart page by default. Make sure you have a separate page for the cart that works well or hide it completely with a custom solution that lets users go back to the homepage with the cart drawer open.    Cart drawers are a smart UX solution that makes shopping online much easier and more enjoyable. But this UX trend isn't just making sure that customers have a good time. It's also making sure that the conversion rate goes up and that more sales are made.    Since we've already talked about how customers benefit, it's time to talk about what e-commerce entrepreneurs and online merchants get out of adding cart drawers to their stores.   

• Different ways to sell more – Adding product suggestions with clever messages or showing related products right below the full list of items already in the shopping cart has been shown to be a very effective way to sell more.
• Progress bar for free delivery – If you have a free shipping policy for orders over a certain amount, which we think is a great idea, you should think about adding a progress bar to the top of the cart drawer to improve the user experience. This psychological trigger makes users more likely to buy as much as they need to get free shipping or delivery, and this is a great way to show them how close they are to getting a gift they want.
• Promotions that are important or current – If you have multiple marketing campaigns or a relevant or ongoing sale, cart drawers can help you get your message across in a way that gets people to buy. 

  Source: Natreve  

4. AR Functionalities

Augmented reality is growing so quickly that Statista says it will be worth more than $18 billion worldwide in 2023.    AR is used in a lot of apps and platforms for mobile devices right now. But this high-tech feature has a place in the world of e-commerce because it can give users a whole new level of experience when they shop online.    People have to get used to buying things without being able to see how big they are, smell how they smell, or feel how they feel. This is because online stores are slowly replacing brick-and-mortar stores. Augmented reality is a powerful UX tool that lets online shoppers see what they want to buy in a more realistic way. This, of course, gives them more confidence about whether they are buying the right thing or not.    AR is the link between brick-and-mortar stores and online shopping because it lets customers try out a product before they buy it. Also, putting money into an augmented reality app can give you more than you could ever offer in a store.    Check out how Deluxe uses augmented reality (AR) to make the products it sells more fun to use.  

5. Navigation that Works Perfectly 

  The design of navigation is a key part of UX. Especially in online shopping. How you set up your navigation has a big impact on how your customers use your store as a whole.    In 2021, navigation should be designed to emphasize usability and make it easy for people to use a website or app. On the other hand, bad navigation design can hurt your store's conversion rate because most users will leave if they can't find what they need or do what they want.    This makes it clear that navigation is an important part of UX that you should give a lot of attention to. Even though UX designers are well aware that designing navigation, like any other UX element, should start with the customer in mind, we want to emphasize this point and ask you to think about it when working with UX experts and giving them the green light for their work.    Imagine you are a customer and write down everything you would want to find and do in a store. From there, make a plan and start.   Your navigation design should be the same for both web and mobile, and it should be optimized for both. It should make it easier for people to find products or sections in your online store.    Here are some ideas for better navigation design:  

• Include filters (especially if your store has a large inventory) – Filters and breadcrumbs can make a big difference in how your store is set up and how different product categories are shown.
• Simplify – Most of the time, tabs and menus that are hard to use don't convert well. In 2021, minimalistic design will become more and more popular. The best way to help people find their way around your store is to keep things simple.
• If possible, add micro animations. – Most people like small animations that don't get in the way, so adding one to your hamburger menu could improve the overall user experience. Keep in mind, though, that these animations might not fit with your brand's values and identity. Before you use this idea, make sure to check with your UX designer again. 

  Source: Addidas   Tip:    Good UX never goes against the ways that users already do things. There are some general rules that should always be followed, like putting the cart or cart drawer in the top right corner. Changing the order of these things is likely to make people feel confused and upset.   

UX Design In E-Commerce Wrapped Up

  UX Design is the tool that shapes how people use your store, try out your products, and think about your brand.    By putting together how your product or service looks and how it works, UX aims to give users experiences that are memorable, pleasant, and useful.    Chatbots, personalized quizzes, optimized cart drawers, augmented reality (AR) features, and carefully designed navigation bars and menus are some of the key UX trends that have been around for a while but will become even more popular in 2021.