User Experience – the benefits for e commerce and other websites
The main reasons purchasers of goods and services search online is for convenience, choice, to save time and money. But their user experience needs to be enjoyable.
The major drawback for them is a slow, complex and unintuitive website that requires unnecessary information, provides poor navigational assistance and is unhelpful with product/service information.
Website audit and follow-up
A thorough user experience (UX) web site audit will reveal problems that may be masked. At SynergiDesign our experienced UX team can analyse the audit results and recommend improvements that can be carried out. If you wish your own team to do this in-house, thats fine, we can support that. Also, what makes us pretty unique is that our experienced UX team and our professional web designers, developers and graphics experts have the combined skills and experience to make us the ideal choice for implementation of user experience principles, if that service is required.
Poor UXD Example
Let’s look at one of the major hurdles a customer has to face when trying to purchase goods and services online - forms.
Forms
Forms can be an essential part of a website but this is just where the customer’s user experience can be at its most negative, for example:
- Requests for unnecessary information, such as date of birth when this has no relation to a transaction
- Lack of ‘help’ or ‘information’ buttons to explain in more detail what should go into the input field
- Loss of information when using the ‘back’ button
- No opportunity to select from a list of categories
- Slow to load or move through a sequence
- No information about stock availability
- Not knowing where you are in the process
- Forms design that does not follow the natural eye-line and take longer to complete
- Localised error checking, before you complete a whole form and you are then notified or errors
and many more...
A thorough audit of the process will reveal failings such as the above, which can all be remedied through the application of user experience design and its effectiveness tested and evaluated.
Strategy: Sketch – Wireframe – Mockup - Prototype
SynergiDesign has always placed usability at the core of its website design portfolio. UX is important to us because we are passionate about seriously good design with the end-user’s interests paramount.
- We know this is important for businesses and service providers and we build relationships that enables us to understand customers businesses, services or systems and therefore the habits and preferences of their end-users
- We work with you to produce a sketch of how user experience can be integrated into your website
- This then facilitates the creation of a wireframe, a basic visual guide that will demonstrate what your website would look like without any graphic or text but including layout of key pages and navigation
- The next stage is the mock-up which builds on the wireframe with colour, graphics and design overlay, giving the look and feel of the finished article. This can often by a pixel perfect design.
- The prototype allows for trials and tests to determine any final adjustments, because we will settle for nothing less than perfect.
SynergiDesign
We are one of the most experienced and established user experience design agencies with customers in Birmingham, London and UK wide.
Contact us to talk to someone who understands that UX needs to be enjoyable – and understands also the importance of creative design and UX business benefits.