Does It Look Good Enough to Use?
Online Shopping website Design can make of break the shopping experience. Usability seals the deal. How much does Design influence sales or purchases?
I subscribe to a “My.yahoo.com” portal page. One of the features is a daily “Daily Picks” with 3 interesting websites to go visit. They are mostly newer sites, or current cool topics, or some other right-now-interesting site. Most are shopping or advertising sites of one sort or another.
Most are very well executed designs.
Most are also some sort of Flash site.
The sites I find most appealing for shopping, however, don’t employ Flash, or music ,or talking bus-boys, or flashing lights and whistles. All of that distracts me most of the time.
I like to get right to where I want to go. I’m a hunter, not a shopper.
There isn’t a perfect design for a shopping website, but if there was, it would have these features:
- Easy-to-See and Use Navigation
- Clear, yet expansive Item Descriptions
- Excellent quality Photos with supplemental views
- An easy-to-find and use Shopping Cart
There are many more design features that make a site appealing for shopping, but if the above 4 aren’t there, it is hard to overcome their absence.
Let me know what you think adds to a website’s online shopping appeal.
Thanks
JLL