The immense growth of popularity of the Ecommerce world means that the competition has never been higher.
Modern people are known for their mostly visual perception and short attention spans so, as you’re dealing with the challenges of modern content marketing, you should also deal with the challenges of modern design.
Users want things to be visually appealing, but not at a price of complicated functionality.
Your storytelling ability is still the most important thing, but there are far more things than choosing the best topic you’ll have to work on if you plan to stay afloat in the years ahead.
Great Expectations of Maturity
Web design is in the constant process of improvement, with new updates being introduced in order to enhance the user experience. But despite the fact that it’s clearly maturing, it’s still subject to whims, fashions, and fads.
You need to keep in mind that it’s not only about higher innovation but also about providing greater utility. The greatest purpose of this evolvement is to meet the equally evolving requirements of the clients.
The thing that will make your business stand out from the crowd is the perfect combination of the intriguing layout and user-friendly experience.
It’s still essential for your web design to follow the latest trends, but without proper user experience, you’ll create a negative connotation concerning your brand.
We’ve come to the point when creative web design and amazing user experience are not only the sign of uniqueness but an expectation – a great one. If you don’t want to go through the troubles the famous Dickens’ character Pip had, take a look at this guide that will enable you to stay afloat in this mature eCommerce design world.
Design To Go
The rhythm of the modern world has largely surpassed that of the Dickins’ atmospheric tales. The modern man is overwhelmed with work and numerous daily obligations so everyday activities that are not work-related are performed in between.
Shopping from your comfy chair has become the luxury many don’t have, and that is the reason why mobile browsing has overtaken the desktop one already in 2016. Today almost every order has been made on the smartphone because that process is not as chunky as in the past and all the users are able to adopt it quickly.
That’s why experts choose the best marketplace and eCommerce platforms to make sure their platform is mobile friendly from the start. The mobile design has also matured with the rest of it and it’s not a problem to get your menu and sub-menus on a small screen.
You may have to give up on your large and beautiful photos, but your users won’t have any trouble understanding more economical icons and any UX issues will be easier to identify and fix with simple micro-interactions.
The Shape of Meaning
In the above described rushed society, it’s perfectly normal that users have less and less time to spend on websites. This means that they won’t even reach the relevant information if their attention is not grabbed instantly, and the very words can do an equally good job as any other element.
While you should pay attention to their meaning, you should also pay attention to their shape.
Typography is a powerful visual tool that can create the personality of your brand, set an overall tone of your website, evoke the emotions of users, and convey all the important information.
With device resolutions getting sharper and easier to read now it’s a perfect moment to employ the use of custom fonts.
Almost every browser is able to support hand-made typefaces, enabling you to boost your UX by creating dynamic parallels. Play around with the trend of contrasting sans serif and serif headings and large letters and you’ll make your visitors keep reading.
You can boost the conversion time with large, bolded titles and shorter messaging – pair up the increased size of your heading tags with much smaller sub text copy where more information is needed.
Beyond The Screen
The flat design has been slowly dying since 2014 and now it’s dead for good. If you think that will damage the navigation, it has been proven that navigation through an ultra-flat design actually takes longer.
If you want to pull your users inside, you need to provide them with some depth. And in order to do that, you can simply use good old shadows. While shadow usage is nothing new, the progress of web browsers has provided you with some new exciting variations and you can now play with your shadows to create an illusion of a world beyond the screen, together with parallax scrolling and grids.
If parallax scrolling has a negative impact on your website’s usability or slows down your load time, there are other ways to retain the joy of scrolling – just use the attached background image that doesn’t scroll with the page.
The versatile effect of the shadow play will not only increase the aesthetics but will also boost your UX by providing emphasis. Designers have been using subtle and soft shadows to designate a link for a long time, but now you can combine them with vibrant colour gradients and enhance their 3D effect.
Employing large and opaque drop shadows behind images and overlapping the layers will create the ultimate depth; just make sure that all of these drop shadows are going in the same direction as if coming from the light source.
The Unreal
Don’t be afraid to experiment. With your web design, you’re creating a completely new world, and it’s actually desirable to make it as different as you can. Modern man has been robbed of his need for exploration, and creating the unreal world will meet that need.
We’re not saying your pages should look like a sci-fi movie – it’s enough to use asymmetry and broken grid layouts to make the users eager for further exploration. This will make your design highly unique and distinctive and it will definitely set your brand apart.
The gradients are recently going through a pretty big incarnation – they’re even being filtered over photos to make less interesting ones more intriguing. But, more importantly, they’re becoming big, loud, and full of colour.
If you think you need to stick with web-safe colours, the technological advancement of monitors and other screen devices that have made them suitable for reproducing richer colours has provided you the opportunity to become more courageous in your approach.
Vibrant shades and supersaturation in combination with re-imagined headers with hard angles and slashes will turn the browsing of your website in a wild ride.
Last week the new Panos Cosmatos film ‛Mandy’ has hit the theaters and achieved a great success precisely due to a bold use of colors – nobody would pay to see Nicholas Cage overacting in a cliche revenge plot if the colors haven’s created that feeling of completely another world.
This movie is also the proof that abstract shapes can also firmly grab the viewers’ attention.
As you can see, the maturity of web design has brought some great expectations when it comes to your Ecommerce UX. If you plan to boost your sales, you need to be present wherever your customers go, and your design should be shining brightly on every device. Some eCommerce tools can improve your web design and it can end up with increased conversions.
Your words don’t need to convey meaning only with their arrangement, but also with their shape. And in order to pull them in you need to create a completely new world that lies beyond the screen.
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