Try These E-commerce Web Design Trends for Better Sales

E-commerce sites need to incorporate a flawless design, UI, and UX to impress customers. When your website looks crisp and is intuitive, users are more likely to spend time on your website and eventually purchase your products or services.

Here are some design trends to look out for late in 2017.

Mobile Responsive Design

Users no longer spend most of their time browsing the internet on a desktop. Smartphones have changed our lives and allow us to view any website we want on a mobile device. Your e-commerce website needs to be responsive and adaptable across devices.

Since space on a mobile device is precious, your design should include bold colors, large images, noticeable buttons and icons, and a hidden menu. Users are accustomed to shopping on their mobile devices, and they want their experience to be easy and clear.

Material Design

Google released a set of principles for web design called Material Design. These principles guide the best practices for how websites look and function. Following the standards of material design allows your website to use surfaces, edges, light, and movement to create an experience that is intuitive and accessible for your users.

Long Scrolls and Lazy Loading

Whether your users are on a desktop or mobile device, long scrolls can be beneficial. For instance, if your business is offering many products, a long scroll allows your users to continue down the page without having to move on to another to see what’s available. Lazy loading is another potential benefit – it lets your website load quicker and only adds more objects to the view when they are needed.

In the world of e-commerce, the ability to continuously scroll makes shopping easier for your customers. Expect to see long scrolls take over e-commerce websites this year.

Conversational Interfaces

Chatbots and conversational interfaces are all the rage. A conversational interface allows users to interact with someone on the website and have any questions answered. Chatbots – like Siri and Alexa – are artificial intelligence-driven mechanisms that can answer simple questions or offer responses.

Utilizing these features in your web design makes your user feel like your business is as engaged as you are. The ability to talk to someone – even a bot – about your products or service will create a sense of inclusion – when they feel included and taken care of, they are more likely to use your business to fill their needs. Having a shopping assistant in the future will allow you to recommend more products to your users, potentially making larger sales.

Emotional Design

Right now, the world of web design is focusing on reaching users emotionally. The use of relatable characters or icons gives users something personal to connect with on your website. Include conversation interfaces as an aspect of emotional design – they humanize your business by creating human interaction.

Utilizing design techniques to reach your users emotionally will build a stronger connection to your business and your brand. After this connection is formed, the user will be more likely to trust your company and give you their business. After all, more people would rather patronize a face than a corporation.

Location Awareness

Location technology allows websites to know where their users are. When a consumer is nearby, businesses can leverage location services to offer coupons, and specials, or remind them of your business. Target has used this to remarkable success with its Cartwheel app, but when it first launched, many questioned whether users would be willing to sacrifice privacy for a good deal. At this point, that fear seems to have diminished, and businesses looking for a competitive edge will be harnessing location technology to bring in customers.

Microinteractions

Users are constantly interacting with websites. Microinteractions are the small design elements on your website that give users some sort of feedback or feeling of communication. Small purchase buttons or easy credit card input options go a long way in the eyes of your customer. Positive micro-interactions will be a must on websites in the coming months; expect designers to put time and effort into these tiny interactions.

Animations and Cinemagraphs

Animations and cinematography help you engage with your customers. These small movable features contribute to their UX and can set your website apart. Animations can be interactive, creating a game-like experience for users. This connection builds a relationship between your website and the customer.

You’ve likely seen more than a few GIFs in the last year or so, and the next reiteration of that is the cinematography. Cinemagraphs are a new and exciting way to upgrade photos. Depending on your industry, a cinemagraph can show users exactly how your product or service works.  

Quality Images

High-quality images and videos of your products and services have always been crucial to good web design, but as technology changes, so do our expectations of these images. Standards like PNGs, GIFs, and JPGs will still be around but expect SVGs – Scalable Vector Graphics – to begin replacing them. SVGs don’t depend on resolution, so they’ll pop on any device – regardless of its screen.

What makes them even more appealing to designers is that they don’t require HTTP requests, which slow down load times for a website. They can also be animated, so they’re an all-inclusive way to liven up a website.

Bright Colors

Bright colors are trending for website design, and that’s likely because the biggest online shopping base is Millennials, who seem to prefer bold colors – think of how they won’t let this bold shade of pink die and how they romanticize the bold colors of the 50s and 60s aesthetic.

Expect to see these bold colors take over many websites, but remember, if your target demographic is an older crowd, you may not use the same color schemes as businesses that target Millennials. Specific colors and design elements can be set depending on the target demographic. But really, this is a positive trend across demographics – bright colors tend to be eye-catching and appealing to different groups. Colors draw your users’ eyes to important aspects of your page and can show off your products in an exciting way.

Cohesive Experiences

No one in today’s tech world uses one device. At the very least, they likely have a desktop and a smartphone, but many users have tablets, smart watches, and laptops, too. The desire for cohesion among these devices is driving the trend for better efficiency as users move across devices. Having this ability will be particularly important for e-commerce web design – people may research on their laptops, but they want to make a final purchase on their phones.

Embrace These Trends to Stay On Fleek

On fleek was a trending term not too long ago. It started with the best-looking eyebrows, then went to the best-looking. If you use this term next year, it may sound dated, or worse, it might mean something else. When trying to keep up with current trends, it’s important to embrace them in a timely manner; otherwise, you look even more out of touch than you might be.