If your website is aiming to sell products online, you will need to impress your users at each stage of their journey. From simple interest, to paying customer, your website users move through what is known as the user flow, to hopefully reach the desired end result. And to be successful, this user flow needs to be centred on the user, and their requirements. So, how does the user flow fit into your web design and planning? And how can you be sure of achieving success? Well, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester, we are Manchester’s leading web design experts, and we provide high quality, effective, web design solutions for a range of local companies and businesses across Manchester, and the surrounding area. This includes Blackburn and Stockport. As a result, we have produced this guide to the user flow and web design for eCommerce.
What is the user flow?
So, first of all, its important to understand the user flow. This is a term used to describe the sequence of actions your users take, in order to make a purchase. This is also known as the customer journey or the customer map. For example, for many websites, the customer journey will look like this:
- User needs to load to website
- Navigate to products
- Find desired product- either through a search bar, filter system, or browsing images.
- Add to basket
- Complete checkout form
- Complete payment
- Wait for email confirmation
While this is a rough outline, its important to define the details of your own user flow by looking at data collected from your website, and how users interact with it. After all, every website is different, and every company is unique.
Improve your user flow
Once you’ve analysed the data for your website, and you have an understanding of how users are moving through your website to achieve their aims, you can then look at the potential problems that your users might be encountering, or points of friction. These could include:
- a website pop-up that disturbs the browsing experience
- slow loading images and product descriptions
- complicated checkout forms without auto-fill
- limited choice of payment options
Each of these issues can have a negative impact on the user flow, restricting progress and in extreme cases, causing users to leave your website, or abandon their cart completely. This can lower your sales and decrease your profits, which is why it’s so important to work on designing an effective user flow.
User flow and web design for eCommerce
Most of the issues that users face when moving through the purchasing journey are down to web design problems. That’s why understanding the user flow, and improving it, should be one of the key considerations when making any changes to your website. This could include:
- optimizing all images for responsive design, SEO, and fast loading times
- simplifying the presentation of product information into tables or bullet points
- simplifying the checkout process to make it easier for consumers to complete purchases
- designing effective filter options for product searches, as well as a working search bar
For more information about effective web design, get in touch with the experts today, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester. We are Manchester’s leading web design experts.