Showcase: Why your website should care about interaction cost

In this post I’ll walk through the few key (in my opinion) things an online store should have going for it. Nothing too serious, just wanted to showcase my designs :D. Nevertheless, I think some these points are valid!

Visuals matter.

For a brand like the one pictured above, that is positioned towards the young who wear streetwear-clothing, the website has to be appealing. The classic; grid of items on a white background won’t do anymore. A brand wants to say something more to actually be differentiated from the rest.

Product page, click to enlarge.

For me, this design project was definetly a passion project, since a dream of mine has for long been to launch my own clothing/apparel brand. This project was to be the website for that brand, but other things (namely, web-development) swept me away from focusing on it. Now, I’d like to add this project to my portfolio as a showcase of my design skills and little bit of backgroung on the choises made while designing. Also, I’d like to talk about why responsivity and good UX really matter in a eCommerce-store.

In this post, I’ll be discussing:

• Visual idendity: why it matters for a brand in a high-competition market.
• Interaction cost: why simplicity and good UX help in getting an user through from initial load to conversion.
• Fast: your website should be fast. But why, and how?

Cart view for the eCommerce website. Click to see larger image.

Visual identity

“Nobody likes boring websites.” is an absolutely false statement in most cases. Being boring as a website is a win for you and your business 9 times out of 10. Why? Because then your product is the eye-catcher. Keeping this in mind, you can approach building a brand website a little differently. There truly is no need for complex animations, bandwith-sucking videos and heavy campaign images on your site. Those things, although they bring a different experience, never bring a better experience for the user. And honestly, what is more important than as-perfect-as-possible User Experience (UX) in todays internet where the slightest delay in getting something done is annoying to almost everyone. That is why low…

Interaction cost

…matters. Interaction cost is defined as the Sum of all efforts that the user must deploy in interacting with a site in order to reach their goals. Now, even though I just talked about the use of heavy videos, animations, large unoptimized images etc, they don't strictly affect interaction cost. But they do affect in the sense that it is slowing down the interaction as a whole.

Consider the website I imagined for a brand: the user has to open the site → find a product they like → add it to cart → fill in their information → confirm their information and order details → get the order details in their email.

The above has interaction cost, but how much it is is ultimately a sum of two metrics: the amount of steps + the time it takes to accomplish those tasks. From this we can identify a clear bottleneck for interaction cost on this type of website: you can’t remove steps after a certain point. We can’t remove the confirmation of the details, because that would result in unnessecary errors in orders. If we add an sign in function to the store, it would eliminate the information filling for recurring users. However, this doesn’t impact the ones most likely to abandon their cart, the first time users. For them, there is a couple of methods for keeping them in the order flow.

1. Good UX - The experience of ordering a item must be simple to understand, clear and helpful. Using tried-and-tested methods for making form filling a little bit more enjoyable, making buttons clear in their purpose, nudging the user in the right direction while they fill forms, navigate the site etc.
2. Fast - Making the website fast will really pay off in the long run. I cannot count the times I have clicked a link on an article or a store, and then backed off because the loading times were so long. Eliminating this from your stores website will absolutely get users actually browsing through the site, and ultimately might end up in higher conversion rates.

So, here was a few ideas to make your site a bit more user-friendly.

If this post resonated with you, and if you are considering starting your own eCommerce website, email me! Also give this article a share!