The Blog: User Experience (UX)

Landing on a poorly designed eCommerce site is like walking into a dimly lit retail store where open boxes line the aisles, the shelves are dirty and employees are listening to headphones. You turn around and walk out, right? Same with eCommerce sites.

eCommerce was on a steady path of growth before COVID-19, but the pandemic rapidly accelerated shifts in consumer shopping behavior and the movement from brick-and-mortar to online transactions.

Most eCommerce digital marketing strategies focus heavily on paid ads and social media, but an eCommerce specialist understands the value of search engine optimization (SEO). Having a sound SEO strategy can help your eCommerce site increase its Google search rankings and result in more converting traffic.

As eCommerce jumps years ahead thanks to the shove out of the airplane we call COVID-19, specialty retail looks for the emergency chute. To quote contributing author and retail expert Greg Petro, “retail is not dead, it is evolving.” Evolving indeed.

Choosing the best eCommerce platform to showcase your products or services requires thoughtful analysis of your business model and objectives.

At its core, user experience design is about solving problems. But before you can solve a problem effectively it must be properly understood and defined.

Writing user-friendly website content requires you to understand your users, front-load important content, use plain language, check your tone of voice and consider metadata.

Would you rather hear a bedtime story read by a master storyteller or a master auctioneer? Pauses, variance in speed and dynamic inflection can help captivate an audience during a story. 

WordPress and Drupal are both content management systems (CMS) that have been around since the early 2000s. Both are open-source (meaning that the source code is made freely available and can be modified and redistributed) and have a strong community of developers who help extend the core functionality with additional modules/plugins.

The Agile methodology has become very popular in software and digital development over the past few years. And rightly so. It provides increased speeds, improved collaboration and the ability to react quickly to changing market trends. However, it was built mainly for developers, not UX professionals.

Creating websites with great user experience means focusing on the humans that will be using the site. Understanding human psychology is important for anyone who is involved in the design, content, information architecture or strategy of a website.

One of the biggest tech trends gaining steam in 2018 is the rise of artificially intelligent chatbots. Thankfully, none are hunting Sarah Conner or trying to run over Will Smith just yet, but the technology driving chatbots has made some impressive strides in the last few years.