Last year, when the pandemic was in full rage, the home delivery of essentials became the most important lifeline for most people. While online retail continued to grow for many years, the ultimate push came during the lockdown period when shopping online was not a choice but became a necessity. When it comes to e-commerce app development in India, many traditional brick-and-mortar stores jumped on the bandwagon.
With the increasing popularity of e-commerce apps and online stores, the engaging user interface (UI) and sophisticated user experience (UX) became the most important attributes of mobile commerce apps to stand out from the competition and push traction.
Excellent UI and UX have emerged as new value propositions for the e-commerce apps over and above what products and services they are selling to the customers. Thanks to a sophisticated shopping experience, an e-commerce app can easily win the competition among similar retail apps offering the same products and services. Therefore, when you build a mobile app from scratch for your retail store, creating an excellent interface and user experience should be your priority.
Here we will explain the key reasons why UI and UX play an essential role in mobile e-commerce apps worldwide. But before that, let us have a brief look at the fundamentals of UI and UX design.
Key Constituents of UI Design
Mobile app UI design depends upon several key constituents. So, let’s have a look at these fundamental aspects of UI design.
· App Layout: This design element corresponds to the utilization of the screen space available for the app interface. It creates the basis of the overall look and feel of the app.
· App Visual: The use of images, graphic elements, animation, icons, and other visual elements that make the app look is essential for boosting user attention.
· Color Scheme: The use of colour shades, contrast, and colour psychology in a befitting manner is vital for a visually engaging user interface.
· Typography and fonts: The choice of font type, font size, and different stylizations are essential for shaping the look and feel of the app.
Key Constituents of UX Design
User experience is extremely important for an e-commerce app and shapes the shopping experience for the customers. It is the ultimate factor to impact business conversion and sales.
· Audience and industry research: For delivering a great user experience or shopping experience, particularly through a mobile commerce app, there is a need for rigorous research into the requirements and perceptions of users and dominant industry trends.
· Consistent experience: The entire app needs to offer a highly consistent user experience throughout the app involving no hitches and sign-ups and downs.
· Prototyping and wireframing: The UX designer needs to create engaging and interactive app prototypes and wireframes to showcase the customers’ user experience and help evaluate the changes necessary for the app.
· Intuitive user experience: The app’s flow and interactive elements should be natural and intuitive enough to help users engage with the app effortlessly.
· Captivating onboarding experience: Any new user appearing on an app must find it captivating. There should be no room for confusion regarding what the app does and how it does.
Why is Great UI/UX Design Important?
For an e-commerce store, to stay ahead of the competition, there are two available ways. The first is to win a competition based on traditional value offerings such as quality, price advantage, discounts, offers, and promotions. The second is to offer an exceptional shopping experience to the customers to push sales and consistent business conversion.
Now let us have a quick look at the key ways UI/UX can benefit an e-commerce app.
More Visibility in App Store and Play Store
Irrespective of the quality of your app, the number of likes you get and you’re ranking in the respective app markers such as App Store and Play Store helps your app boost user footprint and business conversion. Moreover, a superb user interface and captivating user experience can help your app a lot of traction in the respective app markets and help the app to get featured easily.
Creating a Loyal Customer Base
While customers generally land on an e-commerce app searching for a product or service, more than just availability, what matters most is the shopping experience or the ease you make people buy your products and services. Thus, the repeated sales are guaranteed mainly through the ease of shopping and effortless way to complete transactions.
Branding and Promotional Success
E-commerce mobile apps are mostly brought in the digital mixture by big brands to extend the brand outreach in new areas and promote new products and services among audiences who look forward to more innovative and engaging shopping experiences right on their handheld device. Apart from creating a great first impression, a great user experience makes users recall a brand frequently.
Pushing Revenue
Since e-commerce stores often face price wars on the reduces and services from other stores, maintaining a decent revenue becomes difficult. This is where sophisticated shopping experiences powered by a superb branded interface can help maintain the same sales volume without really going for a thinner revenue margin. Moreover, when you create a better value proposition through an awesome shopping experience, you can maintain a standard price tag, unlike others who can only think of price cut as the competitive value.
Conclusion
As e-commerce stores face never-before competition, reaching out to every customer became more important than ever before. Since most customers accessing stores on their handheld devices are restless and lack patience, you need to convince them about your value proposition within just 10 to 15 seconds. In most cases, people go away elsewhere if they don’t find the interface sufficiently captivating and engaging. This is why providing an awesome user interface, and user experience is something that no e-commerce store can undermine.
