Homepages get a lot of attention from everybody in the company so they tend to be pretty well optimized. But there are still 8 common pitfalls that ecommerce companies tend to miss (and don’t even get me started on carousels!).
A lot of “cognitive stuff” today, too: how to reduce cognitive demand, how to leverage price anchoring effect (with some clever ways to do it).
Also, lots of free tools from Google to evaluate your site’s performance. Because your site can always perform better.
Let’s go!
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The Current State of Homepage UX – 8 Common Pitfalls [Baymard Institute]
Homepage on ecommerce sites is usually optimized pretty well. It gets a lot of attention from practically every department in the company.
But there still persist some common UX pitfalls. Learn what they are and avoid them.
8 common pitfalls and strategic oversights to be aware of for Homepage:
- Failing to visually feature a broad range of product types
- The use of overly aggressive and distracting ads
- Incorrect implementation of carousels
- Failing to assist selection of a well-defined scope
- Lack of bespoke imagery and design
- Not making the search field immediately obvious
- Incorrect implementation of country and language selection
- Visual hit areas that don’t match the actual hit areas
For example, let’s take #6: search field. I’m working on improving it with one of my clients currently so it’s dear to my heart.
Users use search when they don’t know what to do or when they get frustrated.
Search is especially important on mobile where it serves an additional purpose: navigation. It’s hard to present nice mega menus with all the nicely laid out categories on mobile so search becomes a multi-purpose tool: navigation, filtering, finding a specific product, or category, or collection.
Don’t do this:
Do this instead:
6 Ways to Reduce Cognitive Demand When Designing UX [UX Planet]
Decision fatigue is when people have made too many decisions over a specific period. Research suggests that it mainly occurs as humans’ cognitive resources diminish with time. Decision fatigue can happen when there are too many choices to consider or when the decisions being made seem inconsequential and don’t warrant any attention.
Here are six ways you can help reduce decision fatigue in your products and services so that customers are more likely to stay on track, achieve their goals, and give you the green light for another sale.
- Reduce the number of choices users have to make
- Make it easy to get back on track if you make a mistake
- Use visual cues for navigation
- Reduce cognitive load by using familiar patterns and conventions
- Design with your users in mind, not yourself or your company
- Keep it simple — don’t overwhelm users with too many options or features at once
Lots of examples for each in the article.
A performance-focused workflow based on Google tools [web.dev]
With the Core Web Vitals metrics now incorporated into Page experience signals, user experience optimization has increasingly become top of mind for website owners. This article will suggest how the various performance-focused tools that Google has made freely available can be combined to effectively evaluate website health and identify pain points, debug and optimize pages that need attention, and continuously monitor and prevent regression.
Step A: Evaluate website health and identify pain points
- Use the CrUX Dashboard to measure the health of your website.
- Use Search Console to identify pages that need attention.
- Use PageSpeed Insights to deep dive on user experience metrics for a specific page.
Step B: Debug and optimize
- Use Lighthouse to audit a page and uncover improvements.
- Use the Web Vitals extension to analyze Core Web Vitals metrics in real-time on a page.
- Use Chrome DevTools to debug performance issues and test code changes.
How to Leverage The Price Anchoring Effect (With Examples) [invesp]
When crafting a high-converting landing page, well, there are dozens of price principles you can take advantage of. One of the most effective principles is called price anchoring.
Every time you see a discount with “$90 $50″, the $90 is the price anchor for the $50 sales price.
The idea behind price anchoring is that customers tend to perceive pricing relatively. A product is perceived as expensive or cheap in comparison to the initial price point.
Once the opening value is set, all future arguments and estimates will be evaluated based on that anchor.
Price anchoring is very essential, especially when you’re selling expensive products.
The article lists many specific examples of anchoring and explains the reasons behind them.
- How NatureBox, Harry’s, and Four Sigmatic Leverage Price Anchoring To Get more subscribers
- How Mindlabpro And Four Sigmatic Leverage Price Anchoring To Sell More Items
- How Casper Leverages The Price Anchoring Effect To Sell More $1k+ Mattresses
- How Organifi and Supply leverage the price anchoring effect to win over their competitors
Organifi gets crazy conversion rates for its pages, about 10%. This is a comparison table at the end of one of the pages. Two effects at once are in play here: the Distinction and Price Anchoring effects.
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Until next Thursday!
Radek Sienkiewicz
PS. Search field on ecommerce (and SaaS, and B2B, etc.) sites. It not only helps people get where they want but also is a valuable research and optimization tool for business owners. If people are searching for something and not finding it? Make it easier to find! (optimization). If people are searching for something but it doesn’t exist? Create it! (research). If it doesn’t exist and you create it, you’re minimizing your risk. You already know that people are actively searching for it.
