Chapter 9
IN THIS CHAPTER
Understanding what the user wants
Adopting user-friendly tips and tricks for your store
Running AB testing to optimize the user experience
The user is the person using your website — in other words, the shopper or hopeful customer. When a user lands on your website, there’s a gap that both you and your customer are trying to fill, a common ground where you’re both hopeful of landing. Your customer wants to find something to buy from your site, and you want them to find something to buy from your site. An optimal user experience brings those two together as smoothly as possible, with as few clicks as necessary.
Online stores are not ‘set and forget’ type businesses, despite what those ads on YouTube tell you — they’re proper businesses that need nurturing and constant attention. Think of your online store as a flower — it needs to be watered, fed and maintained to fully blossom. User experience does these things, and more, because it deals with the people interacting with your digital product — your website.
User experience (often abbreviated to UX) is something we have had a few sneaky looks at within the book already, but it’s a topic that deserves its own chapter. (As a reminder, customer experience — also known as CX — deals with the user’s entire journey within your online business, from the point that they land on your website to the point where they receive delivery of their order, whereas UX is about the experience of using your website specifically. Chapter 7 explores customer experience in detail.)
It’s hard to make sales without the user, so you need to spend time analyzing them — asking them questions, as well as showing them different versions of your website — to see which version of your store they engage with the most. In this chapter I’m going to introduce you to some user experience fundamentals, including user research, AB testing and observing the user — all of which can be achieved using Shopify.
User experience is all about the on-site experience — how a user interacts with your website. You want it to be fast and frictionless, and you want to keep the customer moving towards the checkout.
UX specialists also run (or suggest) AB tests, as well as create designs for AB tests. AB testing is one of, if not the best way to increase conversion rates in ecommerce, and I cover this in more detail later in this chapter in the section ‘Implementing AB Testing’.
Methods to identify problems on your website include surveys that ask specific or open-ended questions, such as: ‘What can we do better?’ However, by far the most fun way of gaining user experience data is through watching screen recordings of users navigating your website, using applications like Hotjar or Lucky Orange (which are both available in the Shopify App Store).
These recordings can be set to have various parameters or triggers as to when they will start recording, and you can filter the recordings and view them using a range of useful filters, including ‘Which Exit Page’. For example, if I find that my product pages have a high bounce rate, I can sit and watch recordings of users who abandon the website at the product page to see if I can identify where the friction occurred. In a recent, real-life example, I could see that the product page was simply taking too long to load — and users were leaving the page in droves.
Conducting user research is a fantastic way to get to know your customers and their needs. Turn to the later section ‘Conducting user research’ to discover some helpful tools you can use to get to know the visitors to your online store.
Creating a good user experience incorporates marketing, research, the digital product and psychology, with the end goal being to design a user experience on your website that engages the customer, informs them of the problem you’re trying to solve, and gets them into your checkout and beyond. If you’re an online seller you’re competing against bricks and mortar, and even digitally against marketplaces and other places your potential customers can go and shop. You need to give your customers a reason to shop with you, and part of that reason has to be the experience — it can’t just be the product and the price.
When it comes to online store design, I often refer to Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville, who created the three circles of information architecture model. Although specifically designed for information architecture, it’s useful for explaining user experience when you set up your menus and site navigation, and serves as a great reference point whenever you’re looking to create a new feature or design on your website — even more so when you’re starting from scratch.
Rosenfeld and Morville defined the key points in each of the three circles (which they call the information ecology) as:
The three circles cross over, like a Venn diagram, with information architecture — or in this case, user experience — at the center of the circles. Defined simply, user experience needs to factor in these three key components. To refine it further, your online store layout, and design, need to take into consideration the user first, and how smooth the experience of navigating your website is, followed by your business goals (the context) — for example, is the purpose of the function you are designing to get sales, to get newsletter sign-ups or to provide information (such as a Shipping page)? Finally, the content, which includes the culture and ideology of the brand, but also ensures the content fits in with the user and context components. Content that stands alone, in its own bubble, serves no purpose. Content needs to be useful and simple, and to lead the user to perform the desired action.
Your navigation and information architecture are key factors in determining whether or not your website is conducive to a good user experience, but the reality is you’ll be constantly creating, editing and changing content within your website.
You’re unlikely to be hiring a UX specialist at this stage of your ecommerce career, and that’s okay, because the good news is there are plenty of basic user experience principles that you can apply yourself, along with some useful tools that Shopify can help you with.
You can do certain things every day to ensure your store is not leaking users. Small improvements across your online store can add up over a year to bring your business forward in leaps and bounds, as Tom O’Neil explains in his book The 1% Principle.
O’Neil’s 1% principle is based on the idea that if you do just a little more than you normally would, every single day of the year, you’re left with a significantly greater result over the course of the year than if you didn’t otherwise. So although the 1% takes relatively little effort each day, the result over the course of the year is significant.
In the following sections, I share some user experience essentials that will hold you in good stead for the entirety of your ecommerce journey.
Interviewing, surveying and recording customers and users, and generally finding ways to monitor their behavior while on your site to find pain points and information about them or potential customers, is incredibly value and not that hard to do. In my opinion, user research never ends as there are always improvements to be found.
The outcome of user research is to take the data and apply it to the design and function of your store. You’ll also be able to find out other useful bits of information when doing user research, particularly around brand perception.
As for which method to use in gathering data, aim for a range of techniques to give you a good mix of attitude and behavioral research techniques, because what people say they do, and what they actually do, are often two very different things.
On the behavioral side, you’ve got tools like Shopify’s Analytics page (within your Shopify admin) and Google Analytics to provide the data, and Hotjar or Lucky Orange to help you observe the user; and on the attitude side you have surveys and focus groups you can use to ask questions around attitudes, such as, ‘What did you think of the website overall?’ There’s definitely a place for both. I encourage user research as often as possible, because research and development (R&D) is an age-old, proven concept.
As you get bigger, you may consider AB testing (for more on this, turn to the later section ‘Implementing AB Testing’), but there’s nothing stopping you from commencing some user research from day one. You’re never too small to start optimizing your website.
Here, I highlight some methods and tools you can use to gather research so you better understand your users and their requirements.
Analytics in ecommerce typically refers to different forms of data dashboards that show an online retailer how their visitors and customers are behaving on their site.
Shopify merchants use two main analytics platforms:
Google Analytics dives a little deeper into the behaviors of visitors on your site, and while used primarily by marketing teams to attribute sales to marketing channels, it’s also an incredibly valuable user experience tool. Google Analytics can give you key performance metrics such as bounce rate, but you’ll be able to check bounce rate at a page level, which is useful for showing you which pages aren’t performing and may need revision. It also shows you your highest and lowest sales-converting pages. GA will also show you page view data, including which pages are being viewed the most, and which pages people tend to exit on, and on what device the user is browsing on. All pretty good insights for someone looking to improve their website.
However, Shopify’s analytics are excellent as well, and you don’t need to install anything — it’s already inside your Shopify admin (Figure 9-1 shows the analytics and reports you get with each Shopify plan).
The Overview dashboard shows sales figures, orders and online store visitor data. You can quickly see how your store is performing, and easily adjust date ranges to see how your store is (hopefully!) growing.
Some of my favorite things about the Overview dashboard include:
The Overview dashboard is a place where Shopify merchants like to dwell. It shows the most valuable metrics that give you insight into the performance of your store and the behavior of your customers. The metrics are shown in numeric format and also as graphs where appropriate. For all the metrics, the percentage change from the previous date range can also be shown; for example, if your online store’s sales have grown by 20 per cent versus the previous period.
The other option from the Analytics drop-down menu is Reports. Shopify has plenty of reports across just about every aspect of your store. It’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with some of the reports, as they can be useful to help you see what’s selling, how your marketing is performing and all sorts of other data.
In the early days, you may not have that many visitors to your site, but observing them is a great way to find improvements. You can watch session recordings of what your visitors do using programs such as Hotjar and Lucky Orange.
Here’s a few ways you can get to know how users behave when visiting your online store to ensure you’re staying ahead of their needs.
I love a good survey. R&D is essential for building anything good, in my opinion. That goes for the products you sell, the people you hire and the digital product you sell on — that is, your website. The research part of R&D can come in the form of surveys, which can then be analyzed to provide insights into the changes you may need to make.
When creating surveys, the key is to ask the right questions. So rather than asking generic questions, try and think about what you’re wanting to achieve with the question. For example, in user research you may want to find out why people are abandoning the checkout, so you might pop up a survey when someone exits the checkout page, but instead of broadly asking, ‘Why are you leaving?’, which opens up non-digital, product-related issues such as price or product, you want to ask about the user experience. So, you might instead ask, ‘Did you face any challenges when using our website?’
You then want to collate the responses and look for themes that need work, such as ‘site speed too slow’. This then forms the basis of the user experience projects that you need to focus on.
These groups involve structured interviews with small groups of your website’s users that seek to uncover how your users feel about your website. Remember, in the context of user experience, these focus groups can uncover how site visitors feel about the usability of your website overall. I like this method because it’s free, and no matter how small you are, you should be able to get a group of family and friends together to form feedback on your website. Focus groups are an underrated tool that even larger online retailers ignore.
Much like focus groups, one-on-one interviews can be a meaningful and cheap way to gather information. Start with family and friends, and remember to look for common themes, such as site speed or image quality, so you can go away with an action plan.
According to a 2017 Think with Google article (‘Find out how you stack up to new industry benchmarks for mobile page speed’), 53 per cent of mobile visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. If your pages take longer than that to load, there’s a good chance you are losing around half of your visitors!
The Shopify App Store has some apps to help increase your site’s page speed, such as:
Broken links can arise if the page you are directing people to has either moved or doesn’t exist anymore. An error message will appear to inform your site visitors, which is definitely not conducive to a positive user experience!
Here are some helpful apps in the Shopify App Store that can detect and fix broken links for you:
Test your website speed and function on every device you can get your hands on. You may find the site is converting well on iPhone but poorly on an older model smartphone, or, worse still, it looks great on your desktop but horrible on your mobile.
If you have a search function on your website (and you should), this is a gold mine of data. Not only can you use this information to research what products to source, but you can also see how well you’re serving people what they’re searching for.
The Shopify App Store has plenty of apps to help with this, including the one I usually use: Product Filter & Search by Boost Commerce.
You can also use more advanced platforms such as Nosto.com that tend to cover a broader range of personalization.
AB testing is one of the biggest levers you have to improve your conversion rate at the lowest cost. It requires little to no marketing dollars, and little more than good ideas, a good testing framework and the ability to take action on the insights. What it does require though, is decent amounts of traffic, so you might need to wait until your traffic is a little higher before commencing AB testing.
So, what is AB testing, and how can you do it in your Shopify store? AB testing, also known as split testing, is essentially showing two different versions of a web page or features on a website to different segments of visitors, with the goal being to see which variation performs better. The main KPI of a successful AB test is usually conversion rate, but it can also be average order value (AOV), overall revenue or simply clicks.
In my opinion, AB testing is a must for any ecommerce business with significant traffic, and using Shopify it can be cheap and easy to get started. Let the data decide what you need to do with your online store — rather than making sweeping design changes, test them first to make sure your ideas deliver as they should.
Sometimes untested design changes go wrong and it’s hard to know why. For instance, I’ve seen checkout page redesigns that look great but where sales tank and checkout abandonment soars, costing that business tens of thousands of dollars. Had that design been AB tested, the business would have seen that it was better to stick with the original design, also known as the control, as opposed to the variant. (You can also test more than one variant against the control.)
On the flip side, I have seen many AB tests deliver huge conversion rate increases, resulting in increased revenue, such as one displaying buy now pay later (BNPL) options on the homepage, above the fold (Chapter 4 explains this crucial web page real estate in more detail). Winning AB tests don’t have to be huge projects, either, as small incremental improvements often achieve more growth than one or two big changes hitting the mark.
You may feel frustrated if you don’t have enough traffic to AB test yet, because it sounds fun — and it is! But you need to wait until you’ve got enough traffic on your site, so if you’re just getting started then you may have a little longer to wait. How much is enough? The answer is, enough to get a statistically significant outcome from the test, and generally, the more the merrier.
So, if I’m running an online store with a conversion rate of 5 per cent and I want to detect if an AB test can deliver greater than a 15 per cent improvement on conversion rate, I need traffic of 13,533 during the AB test.
The length of the AB test is ideally a full business cycle — let’s call it 30 days. This allows for various activities to be normalized — such as the general time it takes for a customer to browse, browse again and then purchase; or external factors, such as positive or negative press, and sale periods.
The big tools for AB testing are generally:
These are probably the most widely used AB testing platforms, but you’ll likely need some help from a developer to integrate them into your store. There are some third-party apps in the Shopify App Store that also may be worth a look, but given the importance of AB testing, and making the sure the results are accurate, I recommend going with one of these three.