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E-Commerce

Best practices for clients including Lowe's, The Business Journals and Sporting News

Screenshots of the SportingNews product page and checkout on an iPad and iPhone Comps of the Product page and Checkout

Design Process

Business goals are fairly easy for e-commerce projects since they are easier to measure success in dollars. Other things to consider are to decrease drop off, and quicker to checkout while also updating the visual design.

General tasks are for users to easily find the product(s) they are looking for and checkout. Constraints are to have desktop/tablet/mobile views.

I have worked on many e-commerce projects, so it made sense to combine them into one topic, however, I thought I’d focus on my most recent e-commerce project with SportingNews Yearbooks. It is another old site that has not been updated in awhile, and it is very easy to make it function and look better. Take a peek at the current/old site and you’ll quickly agree.

My main goal to accomplish with the design is to make it easy as possible to checkout on desktop and mobile. One area to help with this is the checkout form: cutting out unnecessary form fields, combining form fields when possible and make it very obvious as to which fields are required and optional. These things may not seem that important, but when you’re dealing with money, every little thing counts.

It’s important to stay up-to-date with e-commerce trends, so I always make sure to find the latest resources. While researching I found a few helpful resources: Video: How to Simplify Payment Forms by Luke Wroblewski, Ecommerce UX: 3 Design Trends to Follow and 3 to Avoid by Amy Schade at Nielsen Norman Group and Baymard Institute Blog.

After talking with engineering on what ideas might slow the project down to take out for iteration 1, SEO director, and stakeholders, I just needed to make a few minor tweaks before finalizing the design.


Successes & Failures

I didn’t have any unreasonable push back from stakeholders or engineering, and both teams were excited about the designs. I consider that a success.

Failures for this project is that it has been stalled. Which means I haven’t been able to get it in front of real users, development hasn’t started, so therefor it will probably be awhile until these designs can make a difference.


Design Outcome

For the concepts, I was able to accomplish my main goal of making it easy as possible to checkout on desktop and mobile. On the checkout form, I was able to: cut out unnecessary form fields, ie. Fax, Country; combined form fields, ie. first & last name, zip code & city-state, credit card & cvv; and made it very obvious as to which fields are required and optional by labeling every form field.

I will be excited to see this project get into development, get feedback from users, and see how it performs.

Email me @ amy@theamylynn.com, follow me on Behance, or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Amy L Henty ©2023

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