Chapter 9
Understanding the User Experience
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.
Understanding the Basics of a Good User Experience
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.
Specifically, user experience focuses on the design and navigation of the website — the elimination of friction and the ease of use for the website visitor — and ultimately plays a large part in the overall layout of the website, and therefore impacts key metrics like conversion rate and cart abandonment. Your website’s users can be a fickle bunch, and even great websites can have a bounce rate of greater than 40 per cent, so you need to know where your users are dropping off, and therefore which pages of your website require further work.
A user experience hire is called — surprise! — a user experience (or UX) specialist (or something along those lines). You often find these people mapping out the various journeys a user takes while on your website, identifying problems and blockers, and working on designs to improve them, with those designs then going to the developers to implement. You’re unlikely to be hiring a UX specialist in your early days, and I aim to give you plenty of tips as to how you can take a DIY approach to optimizing user experience.
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’.
Getting to know how users behave
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.
Recordings are legal — they don’t display any sensitive information or anything outside of your website, and they are a great way for you to get to know your website better. Everyone should use recordings, not just UX specialists, as I guarantee no matter how experienced you are, you’ll discover something about your website that you can improve.
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.
Considering the theory
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:
- Users: Audience, tasks, needs, information-seeking behavior, experience
- Context: Business goals, politics, technology, funding, culture, resources, constraints
- Content: Content objectives, volume, governance and ownership, funding, culture
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.
Improving Your User Experience
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.
Managing your user experience is a never-ending task, and you should always be seeking to improve your user’s experience on your website.
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.
Certain aspects of user experience are non-negotiable for a successful online store. At this point, I suggest going back through your website’s design (refer to chapters 4 and 5) to ensure that you have considered user experience fully, and if you haven’t already got some of the basics, such as a fast site or a search function, it’s a good idea to pick this low-hanging fruit now by making any changes you require so that you maximize your conversion rate. If you make improvements to your website every single day, one day you might wake up and realize you’re running a successful ecommerce store!
In the following sections, I share some user experience essentials that will hold you in good stead for the entirety of your ecommerce journey.
Conducting user research
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.
R&D comes in the form of research first, development second — what good is guessing what to develop when the answers are so easy to discover from your site’s users?
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 tools
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:
- Shopify Analytics (the Analytics section of your admin page)
- Google Analytics (or GA as it’s sometimes known)
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).
To access your Analytics dashboard, go to your Shopify admin, click on Analytics in the left-hand menu, and then click on Dashboards from the drop-down menu that appears. You’re taken to the Overview dashboard, which provides a whole bunch of useful insights into your store’s performance.
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:
- You can check your recent sales and compare them to a previous time period — for example, were your sales this month higher than last month?
- You can monitor the number of visits your store is receiving.
- You can track your average order value (AOV).
Source: Shopify
FIGURE 9-1: The Shopify Analytics reports available for your Shopify plan.
- You can see where your visitors are coming from — by region or by social media source.
- You can check your conversion rate (the rate that site visitors go on to purchase from your store).
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.
When you click on Analytics in your Shopify admin, you also see a drop-down menu option called Live View — this shows you how many visitors are on your store right now, and where they’re from! You also get a snapshot of your store’s performance that day. Figure 9-2 shows the Live View page.
Source: Shopify
FIGURE 9-2: The Live View page.
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.
To sign up to Google Analytics, visit marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics. You’re likely to need a developer to install Google Analytics, who you can find in the Shopify Experts marketplace (experts.shopify.com).
Observation and usability tests
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.
Both of these platforms can also show you heatmaps of your store, which shows where visitors are clicking and scrolling, and how far down the page they scroll. You may find, for example, that some of your best products aren’t being seen because visitors are exiting the page before they scroll that far down.
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.
SURVEYS
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.
Surveys can be easily added to your Shopify store. Lucky Orange has a survey component, or you could try the Zigpoll Customer Surveys app.
USER (OR FOCUS) GROUPS
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.
USER INTERVIEWS
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.
Monitoring and maintaining your page speed
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:
- Booster: Page Speed Optimizer by Booster Apps
- Page Speed Booster by RoarTheme
To check your page speed in Google Analytics, go to Behavior → Site Speed → Page Timings. Run any slow pages through Google’s PageSpeed Insights page for tips on how to improve certain pages on your website (go to the web page pagespeed.web.dev).
Fixing broken links
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:
- Redirectify by Kelsey Judson
- Broken Link SEO 404 Redirect by Giraffy
You can also find broken links using Google Analytics via the Behavior → Site Content → All Pages report. Search for the page title of your 404 page (that is, ‘404 Page Not Found’) and select Page Title as your Primary Dimension in the top left-hand corner.
Running your own device analysis
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.
As well as testing your site on different devices, remember to test it in as many different browsers (such as Google Chrome and Safari, among others) as you can in case you find one that isn’t performing well. You can test this in Google Analytics by going to Audience → Technology → Browser & OS, or by using a third party such as BrowserStack (browserstack.com).
Optimizing your website’s internal search
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.
To find search terms in Google Analytics, navigate to Behavior → Site Search → Search Terms. Not only can you rank search terms from most popular to least popular, but if you look at the Time After Search in the reporting that appears you can see how long the customer stays on the site after searching for their product. If the time is short, you aren’t showing the customers what they want, so you need to improve your search parameters.
Not sure which page to start working on? Start with the page with the highest traffic and lowest conversions, which you can find using Google Analytics.
Implementing AB Testing
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.
Say you have an online shoe store, and you keep getting returns due to incorrect sizing. A UX specialist, or designer, might come up with an alternative sizing chart, which is then loaded into an AB test, so that half of the users see the current or ‘control’ version of the size chart (option A) and the other half see the new option (option B). After a period of time, when there is sufficient data to determine a winner, you can adopt the size chart resulting in the lowest return rate as the new normal.
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.
Keep an AB tests spreadsheet, where you log your ideas for AB tests. Work your way through them, taking note of the results in a comments field. Try not to have more than one AB test running at a time, in case the results get muddied.
When can I start running AB tests?
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.
In the Shopify blog article ‘The complete guide to AB testing’, Shanelle Mullin references an AB test calculator from Evan Miller that estimates the sample size needed to run a successful AB test. Miller’s calculator asks for your regular, or baseline, conversion rate, and the minimum detectable effect, which is the smallest acceptable improvement for the test to be a clear winner. A 15 per cent relative improvement in conversion rate is what is suggested, meaning you want your conversion rate to be lifted by greater than 15 per cent for the variant to be considered statistically significant — therefore, a win. Any improvement on conversion rate that has a relevant improvement of less than 15 per cent isn’t worth it, or at least you can’t be sure it’s a clear winning test. To be clear, a relative improvement of 15 per cent on a 5 per cent conversion rate is not 20 per cent, it is 5.75 per cent. You’re not talking about changing the conversion rate from 5 to 15; instead, you need to improve the conversion rate by 15 per cent.
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.
Miller’s AB test sample size calculator can be found here: evanmiller.org/ab-testing/sample-size.html.
I’ve got the traffic, so how can I AB test in Shopify?
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.
You can’t run an AB test for forever and a day — until it reaches the right amount of traffic, you’re polluting the test, as visitors may delete their cookies and come back to your website as a new user. But fortunately, you can take action in Shopify to improve your user experience while you’re waiting for AB testing to become an option (check out the earlier section ‘Improving Your User Experience’ to find out more).