How important UI and UX design is for your online store

Whether customers can easily find their way around your online store, complete a purchase and, ideally, come back soon depends largely on the UI and UX design of your store. But what is the difference between UI and UX and what should you pay attention to when designing your store? We provide helpful tips to help you increase your store’s user-friendliness, trust and conversion rate.

What does UI and UX design mean?

User experience design focuses on the design of digital (shopping) experiences. A successful UX design takes into account various factors that offer the customer a positive user experience. This includes, for example, meaningful and intuitive categorization and navigation or a simple and fast checkout that turns a prospective customer into a buyer. The user interface, or UI for short, refers to the visual design of the store. This includes, for example, the layout, colors, fonts, icons and other visual elements.

Inadequate UX and UI design carries the risk of online store visitors not completing their purchase and possibly never coming back. However, if you follow proven standards for usability and user experience, you will achieve numerous benefits for your business: Not only will you increase your sales and profits, but you’ll also attract more new customers by reducing bounce rates and improving the overall quality of your store. In addition, you can even save costs by increasing productivity and reducing support requests. Good UI and UX design therefore pays off.

Our following checklist shows you which areas can be adapted to significantly improve the user experience in online shops and which extensions from the JTL-Extension Store you can use to optimize your JTL-Shop.

Your checklist for optimized UI and UX design

Design

Visitors usually only need a tenth of a second to form an opinion about your store. In 94% of cases, the design is a decisive factor for this first impression. You should therefore consider the following factors when designing your shop:

• Tidy navigation with meaningful categorization is the be-all and end-all in digital business. With our precise feature filter, which you can make available to your customers via JTL-Shop, they will quickly find exactly what they are looking for.
• The next helpful JTL-Shop tool is also located on the topic of finding products: an error-tolerant search such as JTL-Search, which quickly leads to the target even when typos, spelling mistakes or synonymously used search terms are entered. JTL-Search offers the great advantage of After Search Navigation, where the search results can be further filtered, e.g. by color or price.
• Browse, find, feel happy: The Endless / Infinite Scroll plugin for items allows your customers to conveniently discover the range without additional clicks and increases store usability through automatic reloading.
• The design of the product pages should also be customer-oriented: a clear design that focuses on the product and offers just enough information to make a purchase decision is a must. Buttons that are necessary for a smooth ordering process must be highlighted and easily accessible on both desktop and mobile devices. For example, the “Add to cart” button, the shopping cart itself and the “Pay” button are of great importance here.

The well-known credo “less is more” is therefore also a good guide for store design, because not all features that would be technically or visually feasible are also conducive to a clear and target group-oriented user experience. The OnPage Composer from JTL-Shop helps you to design an appealing shop that impresses in terms of appearance and usability, even without in-depth programming knowledge. By the way: A free upgrade to JTL-Shop 5 automatically brings many usability advantages in terms of UI and UX!

Loading times and optimization for mobile devices

The “mobile first” approach has long since become the standard, even in digital commerce. This is precisely why JTL-Shop attaches so much importance to responsive presentation. However, in addition to the design for mobile devices, fast loading times also play a major role. Plugins such as the JTL Speed Optimizer provide a speed boost that makes online shopping even more fun.

Avoid unnecessary clicks and steps

Speaking of speed: customers buy online because they like convenience. Your store must meet this requirement. The faster users find what they are looking for, the better the user experience. That’s why it’s important to reduce your purchasing process to the most necessary steps and guide customers to their destination in a relaxed and direct manner: Search. Find. Buy.

• The selection may be large, but you deliver exactly the products that your customers are interested in: Through intelligent up- and cross-selling, in which you recommend similar or complementary products such as matching accessories to your users, you relieve your customers of further search queries and increase your sales at the same time.
• When it comes down to it: as soon as items have landed in the shopping cart, an invisible race against time begins. The aim here is to move customers safely from the shopping cart to the checkout and reduce the bounce rate to a minimum shortly before they reach their destination. An effortless checkout is therefore one of the most important factors in the design of your store. In JTL-Shop, the checkout is therefore reduced to three essential steps: Address entry, shipping and payment as well as a final check when completing the order.
• It’s even faster and more convenient with the 1-Click-Checkout in JTL-Shop. If customers have already placed an order with you and set up a customer account, they can complete their next purchase with just one click. The system takes over the data entered in the previous order. This option can also be offered directly on a product tile in the overview, for example, in order to complete the purchase even more quickly.
• An express checkout can also be carried out automatically via various
  payment service providers. Providers such as PayPal, Amazon Pay or Apple Pay save your customers from having to enter personal data and carry out the payment process in just a few steps. It is generally advisable to offer customers different payment service providers, as they have different preferences. You can also find suitable solutions for this in the JTL Extension Store.

️Reviews as a source of trust - social proof

Whether it’s a star rating, a detailed review or a Trusted Shops seal: people are interested in the experiences of others. In fact, customer reviews are the most important source of information for more than half of online shoppers before making a purchase. With the free Trusted Shops Easy Integration plugin, you can implement Europe’s best-known symbol for security and service in your store and collect and market authentic reviews and customer reviews at the same time. In the blog post ” Reach for the stars! How to get more customer reviews “, we also have more tips on the topic of “online store and product reviews” in stock for you.

️Answer questions before they are asked - FAQ and help pages

If customers have to think too long about a purchase decision and cannot find answers to their questions in your store, this usually leads to them abandoning the purchase. This is why help pages and FAQs on product detail pages have proven to be a useful tool. They provide illuminating answers to the most frequently asked questions on the customer side and thus not only lower the hurdles in the purchasing process, but also minimize support requests. This in turn saves valuable time and therefore human resources.

The eye also buys - investment in UI and UX design pays off!

As you can see, UI and UX design can tip the scales on the way to a completed order. A well thought-out user interface and a positive user experience are rewarded with higher conversion rates, stronger customer loyalty and ultimately more sales. An appealing UI and UX design is therefore not just an aesthetic aspect, but a decisive advantage over your competitors.