Imagine having a car with a stunning design but lacking a proper engine system. What you have looks pretty, but it doesn’t consider how you want to use the product. This is like when your website doesn’t engage users, and you need to improve the User Experience.
I believe you should answer 3 “How to” questions to create a remembering User experience for your website:
- How to Describe User Experience
- How to Improve User Experience
- How to Measure User Experience
So, without any further ado, let’s get started.
How to Describe User Experience
Before discussing different ways to improve user experience, we should figure out what we are dealing with. So, I want to talk about what you may consider your UX design.
✅ What is Important in User Experience?
To answer this question, I should define user experience goals first. But honestly, there’s no commonly accepted definition for user experience. But experts believe your UX design should aim at these below items.
- Taking the user into account
- Solving problems through empathy
- Improving how useful, easy, and addictive it is to use a website
- Generating positive emotions
- Deeply understanding the user’s needs and objectives.
✅ What Makes a Good Website User Experience?
User experience ensures that users find value in what you provide to them. To create a valuable User experience, your information must have these qualities.
🔸 Useful
Your content should be original and satisfy customers’ needs. H&M is a great example. On this website, the user is guided through a very well-designed experience. Any user can get as much info and pictures about clothes as they need without any difficulty.
🔸 Findable
Your website content should be navigable and easy to find. The Yelp search filter is known for its exceptional findability. It uses your location to provide a combination of reviews and helpful filters, guiding the user to the perfect destination. It seems perfect to me!
🔸 Credible
Users must trust and believe what you tell them. Testimonials become handy in this case. The Segment is a successful example. Their homepage contains different parts, such as their services and offers. But right before the CTA, Boom! They show comments from their clients, IBM and Meredith leaders. I mean, this is a knock-out punch!
🔸 Flexible
Your website must be easy-to-use. Reduce the steps as much as possible to let users find what they want without any friction. ETQ website reduces the number of categories using a navigation bar at the top of the screen. This provides a comfortable design that helps the customers focus on what they want.
Now that you know what you are dealing with, I want to share some ideas to improve the user experience of your WooCommerce store.
How to Improve User Experience in WooCommerce
As I said, user experience has no specific rules and modifications with changing customer behavior and interests. But I’m sure you always need to improve the user experience of your website, whether you are a new WooCommerce owner or Jeff Bezos.
Thanks to WooCommerce plugins and features, you have thousands of choices to try in your website UX design. But I want to gather them into three main categories and discuss them separately. Let me begin with product pages, an important one.
✅ Product Page Improvement
Your product page is where your customers finally decide to either buy your product or leave your store. So customers won’t get to checkout or landing pages unless you create compelling product pages.
These are some tips to do on product pages to improve user experience.
🔸 Use effective CTA buttons.
Your add-to-cart button should be impossible to miss without clashing with your user experience design. Here are some ideas for the CTA button.
- Use words focused specifically on the actions you want customers to complete. “Buy now,” “sign up,” and “register” fall within this category.
- Add supporting text nearby. Additional details like “30 days free” or “no credit card needed” can give people the push they need.
- Try first-person speech. Studies show that “start my membership” may convert better than “start your membership.”
🔸 Optimize Images
When it comes to image optimization, people think of lowering the size or scaling the dimensions. But more practices should be done to improve user experience.
- Include a product image that indicates how large or small the product may be.
- Provide all necessary viewing angles.
- Show the customer a product image for each color or style you offer.
- Use high-resolution product images to enable a way to zoom in on any part of the product.
- Always position your product against a white background in the main photo.
- Create infographics of the most important information about your product. It should include key features, materials, dimensions, and important claims.
🔸 Enhance product descriptions
Online shops usually list product features when writing product descriptions. This harms user experience because people don’t understand how the product helps them.
To improve user experience in product copies, you should focus on these two factors.
▪️Relevance
Every sentence you write in the product copy must show specific information about the product. Avoid using phrases like “excellent quality” or “unique design”.
These phrases are general and do not clearly mention a compelling feature.
- Add relevant keywords
- Make a Q&A box to resolve obscurity
- Mention the product’s actual size, materials, and care instructions
- Emphasize benefits instead of features
- Talk about the consequences of not buying your products
▪️Readability
Product copies should be scannable. You can use different text options to make it pop out.
- Include a maximum of 300 words
- Use text boxes
- Highlight the key features with yellow or green
- Use one-line phrases with a larger font size
- Add a “strong” tag to important phrases to make them bold
- Use Bullets or numbers for lists or short phrases
🔸 Add videos and GIFs
Product visuals aren’t just limited to photography. GIFs and videos also help your customers make more informed decisions.
GIFs should be short and placed among the product images.
For videos, you have 2 options. You can add a short introduction video of your product and put it after the images. Or you can create How-To YouTube videos to show the product in action.
✅ Offers Improvement
I like a shirt and add it to the cart. You offered me a pair of jeans based on that shirt. I like the jean and add them to the cart too. A simple but highly effective process.
If you pay attention to the offers and understand what customers like, you can easily make a pleasant shopping experience for them. You can improve the user experience for offers in two ways.
🔸 Use upsell and cross-sell
As you know, upselling is an upgrade to the existing purchase, while cross-selling is an additional purchase. But how can these offers improve user experience?
The upselling strategy provides value to customers because it offers them to pay a little more but end up with a better product. It’s a mutually beneficial deal.
If you cross-sell something that merges with your customer’s needs, they will trust your brand even more because they understand you care about their interests
I suggest using these two plugins to automate the offering process.
▪️ Recommendation Engine
You may have faced recommendations like “Because you watched” or “Because you added to your list” on Netflix. This plugin lets you set the same style of product suggestions on WooCommerce.
- Related Products By View: Products that customers also viewed
- Related Products by Purchase History: Products are often purchased by the same users
- Products Purchased Together: Products are frequently purchased at the same time and in the same order.
A single site license of the plugin will cost you $79.
▪️ Product Recommendations
A plugin by WooCommerce developers. It enables you to create personalized customer recommendations based on their specific behaviors and interaction patterns.
You can place recommendations at more than 20 locations on your website:
- Main shop page
- Products category or tag pages
- Individual product pages
- Cart and checkout pages
- Thank You (order-received) and order-pay pages
The plugin costs $79.
🔸 Enable WooCommerce Wishlist Plugin
Offering wishlists effectively reduces shopping cart abandonment and fulfills sales from customers who showed intent but didn’t purchase. But how do they improve user experience?
- WooCommerce Wishlists give customers an effortless way to remind themselves of their favorite product.
- Wishlists act as reminders for customers to purchase things they will need in the future.
- Customers can share wishlists with their loved ones and close friends for Christmas, birthdays, and other special occasions to show what they desire.
I know two plugins that will help you with building a better experience through wishlists.
YITH Wishlist
Ask for any WooCommerce marketing plugin, and YITH will be there for you! Their wishlist plugin, with its easy-to-use interface, is a great hack to improve user experience. Here is what the plugin can do:
- Allow your customers to create multiple wishlists
- Monitor your customers’ wishlists and the popular products
- Send promotional emails for products in wishlists to push customers to buy
- Allow your customers to ask for an estimate directly from their wishlist page
- Let users buy the product right from the wishlist page
Also, the plugin lets your customers download the wishlist content as a .pdf file or share the wishlist on their social networks. You need to pay $95 for the premium version. Not too much for all these features!
TI Wishlist
With over 100k installs and immediate updates, TI Wishlist has recently become a popular plugin among WooCommerce owners. Fortunately, you’ll have basic features like Customizable wishlist table columns, an “Add to wishlist” button, and a social-share option for free.
However, the premium version gives you amazing features:
- Multi wishlists per user
- Product analytics for admin
- Promotional emails
- Additional shortcodes and widgets
- Following wishlist feature
The premium version costs $79 with a money-back guarantee for two weeks.
🔸 Try special occasions offers
How do people feel on New Year’s Eve or holidays? Probably in a positive mood, and eager to get something exclusive. This is the time when they may look at your store for special offers.
Here are some ideas to bring good vibes to customers on special occasions.
▪️Offer a coupon code
This can include fixed amount & percentage coupons, free shipping, and coupon with product purchases.
▪️Gift some products with a purchase
You can offer a low-value or low-selling product as a gift. The best practice to find these items is to run an ABC analysis and choose products of type C.
▪️Giveaway a branded item
Giveaway always conveys happiness and good memory to your customers. Pen, mug, and notebook are good choices for branded items.
▪️Launch a new product with a limited discount
People always love to be the first ones. You can use this as leverage to improve user experience.
For example, set a %50 discount on your new items for the first 10 buyers.
▪️Use gamification
Holding fun and exciting events helps get the audience’s attention and create a happy brand image. Basically, gamification is a low-cost idea you can get a good result from. GRATISFACTION is a plugin designed to execute different gamification ideas.
✅ Shopping Process Improvement
What is the shopping process? Almost every single element of your website is a part of the shopping experience. But I want to discriminate between the browsing process and the time when customers decide to buy.
Think about the time between add to cart and checkout as the vital part of the user experience.
What can you do to improve the user experience here? Focus on gaining trust and removing friction. Let’s see what we have below.
🔸 Enhance Website Speed
Near %50 of consumers will abandon a page that takes three or more seconds. But you may have loyal customers that will wait for more to visit your products. It could be true. And they will come back if they face errors or low speed. WRONG!
When it comes to money, psychology beats loyalty. Every second you lose, you let visitors think more about the reason for their purchase.
So try to finish the buying process as shortly as possible.
You can find different professional tips to improve website speed with a simple google search. But I want to mention simple practices you can easily apply to your website.
▪️Reduce or update plugins
Check out all the plugins and define why did you install them? Your new plugins may cover the old ones, and you could eliminate them.
Besides, plugins with outdated software or poor design also can contribute to slow website loading. You can deactivate each plugin and run a Google PageSpeed test to compare the results. If a plugin is slow, update or replace it.
▪️Optimize your images
Images always use more traffic, and optimization will greatly affect website speed.
- Use JPEGs for photos or images with lots of colors, PNGs when you need transparent images, and GIFs for animated images.
- Compress images with built-in image compression features on image editing tools or a web tool like TinyPNG or JPEGmini.
- Choose a default dimension for product images and resize them using image editing software on your computer.
▪️Enable caching
With caching, your site data will be stored in temporary storage, and it doesn’t have to re-download files from your server every time. You can enable caching with plugins like W3 Total Cache or W3 Super Cache.
▪️Clean-up your database
As your store grows and your website faces more traffic, your database will confront unnecessary files that slow down your performance. You can remove the items that aren’t needed by installing plugins like Advanced Database Cleaner.
▪️Do not use web fonts.
Web fonts are popular, but they have a negative effect on website speed. Use modern formats WOFF2 and include only those character sets and styles that are used on the site.
▪️Compress files with GZIP
GZIP compresses the files before sending them to the users’ browsers. You can implement GZIP on your website by adding some lines of code. Or simply use GZIP from the GNU project.
🔸 Utilize live chat correctly
We all know using live chat will solve customers’ doubts and improve user experience. But many of us don’t know how to use live chat in the right way. I have some suggestions.
- Break a lengthy paragraph including all solution steps and press enter after one or two sentences.
- Keep your language clear and simple. Use direct words: On, Some, Most, Under So, To.
- Do not use colloquial shortcuts like BRB (Be Right Back), LOL (Laughing Out Loud) or np (No Problem).
- Never say “I Don’t Know”. If you can’t resolve the issue, it is best to inform the customer that you will get back to them soon.
- Don’t start your answers with “I think”, “Let me see” and “Maybe”. Keep a confident tone.
🔸 Have a clear refund policy
People are deciding to buy your product, and suddenly they ask themselves, “What if I don’t like the color?”. This is when they look at your refund policy. You should include five terms in your return policy.
▪️The duration for return
Define how much time customers have to refund their purchases. One week or one month?
▪️Conditions for return
Specify the conditions of the item you can accept. For example, original packages and tags are needed or scratches and openings are not accepted.
▪️Return exceptions
Mention which products or categories cannot be exchanged or refunded. Gift or discount items usually are mentioned here.
▪️Option for customer to receive payment
Inform your customers how they can get their money back. Store credit or the same way as they paid?
▪️Time to receive payment
Give customers an estimation of how long it takes to refund appear in their account after the items have been approved
🔸 Make the checkout process easy.
What are the most common reasons for shopping cart abandonment? Invesp answers. This means a little mistake in the checkout costs you a lot.
How do we avoid these checkout experience missteps? I have some ideas. But you need to add a checkout plugin like Checkout Field Editor or Bolt Checkout to your WooCommerce store to execute them.
▪️Make “Guest Checkout” the Most Prominent Option
On the account-selection step, set guest checkout in the upper-left option on the desktop and the top option on mobile.
▪️Avoid Complex Password-Creation Requirements
Impose the fewest number of password requirements allowable. I recommend making the only password requirement to be 6 lowercase letters.
▪️Use “Delivery Date” Instead of “Delivery Speed”
Displaying “2 Business Days” forces users to research, calculate, and guess. Provide a delivery date or a date range.
▪️Use Luhn Validation
Luhn validation checks to see if the card number entered by a user is plausible. Alerting the user upfront that the card number entered isn’t valid allows users to correct it before the entire payment form submission.
▪️Autoformat Spaces in the “Credit Card Number” Field
Use an input mask for the card number for the appropriate card type after it’s been autodetected.
▪️Match the Credit Card Field Sequence to the Physical Card Sequence
For most cards would be “Card number” > “Expiration date” > “Cardholder name”, and then always “Security code” as the last field.
▪️Allow Users to Edit Data Directly at the Review Step
Users should be allowed to edit data via inline form fields or page overlays at the review step.
▪️Don’t Use Jargon in the Checkout Microcopy
Carefully determine microcopy something a general user would understand. Opt for more widely used language.
▪️Mark Both Required and Optional Fields Explicitly
It’s best to be explicit and mark both required and optional fields in forms to ensure no confusion.
▪️Support the “Back” Button Used for Navigating to Any Previous Checkout View
Ensure that the browser “Back” button takes users back to the previously viewed step, regardless of whether it’s technically the same or a separate page.
Now we are going to figure out how to evaluate our UX design.
How to Measure User Experience
When measuring a factor in digital marketing, there are certain KPIs to focus on. But user experience is different. It consists of several parameters that need to be tracked. However, some metrics become handy in this situation.
✅ Task Success Rate
This metric looks at how successful users are with certain tasks. For example, if the task is registered on the website and 8 out of 10 visitors completed it, TSR would be:
TSR = 8/10 = 0.8 × 100 = 80%
✅ Average Time on Task
The length of time users spends on an activity can be crucial to measuring its success or failure. Assume these numbers are how much time 8 people spend on registering.
32, 60, 46, 73, 29, 38, 53, 25 seconds
ATOT = (32+60+ … +25)/8 = 44.5 seconds
✅ User Error Rate
The metric lets you know how often users have tried but failed to complete a task. If that 10 visitors had 2 mistakes on registration forms totally:
UER = 2/10 = 0.2 × 100 = 20%
✅ Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
This metric is a little different. This time, the score is calculated by directly asking users about their overall experience. The score ranges from 0 to 100, where 100 represents maximum customer satisfaction.
CSAT: [(Number of satisfied customers) / (Number of respondents)] x 100
These numbers will give you a better status of how is your UX design working and where you need to improve user experience.
Final Words
UX, as the name goes, is all about User Experience. And a good experience is created only when your website data feels useful to the user. But remember, UX design is not all. Also, observe UI, SEO, and marketing funnels.
We would like to hear how you will start putting our tips into place to improve user experience, or maybe you would like to share your ideas. Let us know by leaving a comment.
