Improving an Ecommerce User Experience Through Data-Driven Design

August 8, 2022

What is data-driven design? A design process through which we can derive valuable insights and make design decisions by keeping both the data and our users’ behaviors in mind. Consumer behaviors influence our designs, verify our assumptions and conclusions, and enable us to evaluate experience outcomes. The data divulge details about consumer needs and new trends, allowing teams to understand their target market and confirm or iterate their design decisions. Such data play a key role in achieving better business outcomes. When your UX design techniques include data-driven design, you can drive definite outcomes.

Why Consider Data-Driven Design?

Observing customers, analyzing their behaviors, and deriving conclusions from them is crucial to successful ecommerce design. Accurate, insightful data lets you verify your design hypotheses. If you rely on just using your intuition or on creating beautiful designs without conducting any data-driven analysis, your organization might waste money by implementing your designs, which could be turn out to be impractical and actually reduce a site’s traffic.

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It isn’t possible to predict users’ needs without gathering actual data about their behaviors. We can derive knowledge and understanding from data that we’ve verified to be correct, which enables us to design and implement solutions that improve an ecommerce Web site or product’s performance, thereby boosting sales. Utilizing such data throughout design ensures that your organization can address and solve consumers’ problems and meet their needs.

Let’s look at a few examples where data-driven UX design techniques have played a key role in improving the return on investment (ROI).

In 2014, the airline Virgin America conducted multivariate testing when developing a new and more user-friendly Web site. They compared several design variants to determine which one performed better. As a result, their conversion rates rose as much as 14%, they reduced support calls by 20%, and their customers were able to book their flights faster than before, using many different devices.
An ecommerce Music & Arts Web site used two user-centered design approaches: usability testing—during which potential users attempted to complete real tasks using the site’s user interface—and heuristic evaluation, which let design experts identify problems with their Web site’s redesign. As a result, their online sales skyrocketed by 30%, year over year.

Visually Pleasing Design Versus Data-Driven Design

There’s a huge difference between Web sites or products looking good versus performing well. To develop a user-friendly Web site, you should be well informed about the factors that you need to consider during design and those that don’t matter. During a site or product’s nascent stages, certain features might seem to be necessary. However, these same features could prove to be more confusing than convenient. Understanding the consumer’s experience with an estore or product and utilizing relevant data to make design decisions results in your creating a data-driven Web site design. Such Web sites are more effective, which makes their users more productive and the business more profitable. Complete comprehension of the target audience, their requirements, their problems, and the Web site features they need ensures the development of a successful ecommerce Web site.

Informing UX Design Through Data

Often, entrepreneurs end up spending a fortune to make an ecommerce Web site look more attractive and appealing to their customers. However, they’re wasting their money if the Web site isn’t user friendly.

For example, the popular online shopping portal Flipkart has adopted a shopping cart as its business logo. The result of such strategic thinking is that their logo instantly informs their customers about the nature of the business. This highlights the importance of having a user-centered approach to UX design. Ecommerce Web sites across the globe aim to build Web sites whose entire focus is on their users. Therefore, good UX design has its foundation in sound data. Incorporating your learnings from data into your design solutions is of the utmost importance. But how can you include data in your designs? Let’s consider a few data-driven UX design approaches for an ecommerce store.

surveying—Conducting surveys is key to becoming aware of all the areas of an ecommerce Web site that need improvement. By running surveys to answer such questions as what are the most-searched-for, most-viewed, and most-purchased products, you can understand customers’ shopping behaviors. Such surveys can provide valuable insights in real time, and these insights can play a pivotal role in boosting a Web site’s ROI.
usability testing—Any consumer wants an ecommerce Web site or product to provide a smooth, easy, and even great shopping experience. Through usability testing, you can discover what design solution consumers would prefer when shopping and checking out on an ecommerce site. This method of research provides insights that can help you to create a Web site that accords with customers’ needs.
A/B Testing—In this method, also known as split testing, an organization compares the conversion rates of two versions of a Web page using live traffic. A/B testing takes all the guesswork out of Web-site optimization and encourages the designers doing the optimization to make data-driven design decisions.
site analytics—One of the most powerful data-driven methods is the use of Web-site analytics. You can track the users’ interaction patterns on an ecommerce Web site. The data provides crucial insights such as the areas of a page or site in which users spend most of their time and what actions they subsequently take.
consumer research—By conducting consumer research, a Web site’s developers can educate themselves about what consumers want and what they don’t want. Sufficient consumer research ensures a well-planned ecommerce Web site.

The Data-Driven Design Approach Is the Future

UX design is challenging. Even the tiniest details can have a huge impact. In today’s digital world, simply building an attractive ecommerce Web site isn’t sufficient. Creating a Web site using a data-driven approach is the way to go. Understanding buyer’s behaviors, competitor’s strategies, and search-engine optimization (SEO) approaches is essential to ensuring an ecommerce Web site’s success. Taking a data-driven design approach is a make-or-break strategy for any ecommerce business. To ensure a successful data-driven approach, you must consider data collection, analysis, and implementation techniques that can help an upcoming ecommerce Web site to grow its traffic and convert visitors to customers.

Make sure that real-time data analysis supports your ecommerce strategies and track the effects of data-driven design on shoppers’ behaviors. Although you might want to try various approaches to data-driven design, always make sure that the changes that you integrate into your Web site provide a smoother, easier, more personalized and satisfying experience for your customers.

In Data-Informed Design | eCommerce Experiences

Improving an Ecommerce User Experience Through Data-Driven Design

Why Consider Data-Driven Design?

Visually Pleasing Design Versus Data-Driven Design

Informing UX Design Through Data

The Data-Driven Design Approach Is the Future

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Kelly Anderson

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