With the rapid growth of e-commerce over the last few years, with no signs of slowing down anytime soon, you’d think every business would have a carefully thought out website aimed at capitalising on such a big potential market, right? Wrong. More and more it’s apparent that poor web design is hindering potential success of a company, this is worrying. This blog post sets out the importance of high quality web design!

Why is design so important?

The first reason to consider is the increasing number of competitors that e-commerce now receives making quality web design paramount (Ghandour et al, 2010). DeLone and McLean (2003) maintain that a further reason for careful consideration of web design is that quality of the site will affect subsequent use, which in term determines benefits accrued the organization. Epstein (2004) asserts that the further benefits from good web-design are channel optimization, cost saving, customer loyalty and retention. However, you’ll have to keep in mind that if your business is offering a poor product good web design isn’t going to ensure all the sales in the world because customers simply may not want to purchase the product. Yet superb web design may be able to facilitate a way for sales to be made.

Not only this but studies have proven than content is actually less important than design for building trust with your audience. Briggs et al (2004) found that 94% of internet users said that web design was more important than the content on the site, with only 6% of users disagreeing. It’s clearly quite important, had that study been undertaken now where poor web design plagues the web a considerable lot less than in 2004 due to ever increasing technology the results may have been different. However, the point that remains is that web design and content go hand in hand, a visitor wont want to ready your sites content if the site in question is poor, and on the dame token, if the content is poor then the users probably wont care for how nicely the sites designed (Hendricks, 2015).

Accessibility and web design

Ultimately good web design should promote accessibility, but why does this matter? Accessibility is highly important to any business that wants to make their site a success, quite simply it’s key (Rosen and Purinton, 2004). A lack of accessibility will frustrate customers, making them less likely to buy. Not only this but a lack of accessibility will result in more time allocated to customers to reconsider their purchase, ultimately leading to a loss in potential sales for the brand (Romaniuk & Gaillard, 2007). Additionally, Stewart (2014) explains that one of the key drivers in attracting an older market to a site is accessibility. Put simply, a lack of accessibility due to poor web design can cost you sales, and lead your customers into the arms of competitors!

But does it really matter?

Web design really affects branding, the design of a site isn’t your brand in it’s entirety of course but it is one of the essential branding elements that helps build trust with your audience, (Hendricks, 2015). Lake broke down the key reasons that web users didn’t trust a site in 2014, amongst this list a key theme that just kept reoccurring was that the site was too dated, it was too cluttered, it had a poor look and feel, there was poor navigation an there was no about us page. What does this tell us? No one will trust your brand if your web design is poor, when no one trusts a brand then no one will buy from that brand, meaning that your brand has no sales revenue which is believe it or not a sure fire way to go out of business fast! So think about redesigning your site!

Ultimately branding is an investment that grows over time with the end goal of getting people to trust the brand. Brands are perceptions and brand elements such as names, logos, tag lines, trade marks and  packaging are short cuts to these perceptions (Spool, 2002). Meaning that if you want branding done properly, focus on your web design!

Recap:

Web design is so important because:

• Of the vast number of e-commerce competitors.
• It promotes accessibility, leading to more potential sales.
• It can promote customer loyalty
• It allows web users to trust the brand

Example of web design hindering the success of a brand

Buffer

In 2014, Lovin was tasked with redesigning Buffers, the social media flow managing site, home page. When analysing the site, Lovin noticed that the original site was somewhat bloated, which hindered its effectiveness. The site wasn’t bad, it explained the product, it outlined the key features of the product, backed up with a few exceptional user testimonials from Twitter. The issue with this is that it was almost too accessible, it provided lots of places for a user to get distracted & click away.

On the task of redesign Lovin sought out to reduce the possibility of distracted users. He did so by making the headline a short but efficient description of the brand it was something that could’ve been understood in 5 seconds, this simplified the process. Not only this he then changed the sign up/log in flow from a list of four possible ways to subscribe on the far side of the page, to a simplified way of logging in via Facebook or Twitter directly under the headline. He then went about compiling all what Buffer did with a new brand image, instead of an about page, yielding the website with a simpler feel.

Here’s the old landing page compared to the newer one:

 

But what does this all mean? Why does this matter to the success of the website?

Well, Lovin then tested how much this really affected the success of the site by sending 50% of users to the old site, and the other 50% to the new site in a 24 hour period.

	Old site	New site
Page views	14,556	16,437
New Sign ups	762	994
Conversion rate	5.23%	6.05%

 

The results: Lovin’s new site received a 16% in new user conversion, which is quite frankly astounding to think that something as simple as an overcrowded landing page really hindered Buffers success for so long.

You may have noticed that a big factor in this redesign was decluttering the landing page, was this a one off or is this a common issue?

Buffer wasn’t the only company to find issues with cluttered landscape of a site, Jim Blankoff, the CEO of Vox Media stressed the importance of web design, stating in 2012 that many organisations are suffering from cluttered and bloated webpages. Morrissey adds that this is putting users off from revisiting, and explains that the reason for this was that websites are often designed by technologists and not designers, which ultimately hinders their success!

Examination of AIFF

AIFF apparel is an online independent brand offering their exclusive ‘AIFF’ branded T-shirts and sweatshirts. The brand targets the student streetwear market, and has found a predominant male following aged 18-22 in the UK.

AIFF’s online presence lacks great detail in terms of about page which can be seen to weaken the brand, unlike market leaders such as Obey or Brixton. Their site initially shows the logo in a very subtle way, in white on a coloured background, establishing some what of a brand identity, however.

My gripe with the site is that it goes straight into showing products, it doesn’t offer anything, extra. The all white background looks unfinished and we have no idea who the brand is, personally, it wouldn’t encourage me to buy anything from the site. The web design could do with vast improvements!

Final thoughts

By now it should be blindingly obvious that web design is crucial to the success of your e-commerce business, obviously it’s not the ultimate saviour for a poor brand selling poor products. But what it does do is facilitate sales, and helps establish a brand! If your site is designed poorly, I’d suggest embarking in a journey towards better web design!

If you’d like to read more on Buffer’s redesign, click here.

References

Epstein, M. J. (2004). ‘Implementing E-Commerce Strategies: A Guide to Corporate Success After the Dot.Com Bust.’ Westerport: Praeger Publishers.

Ghandour, A., Deans, K., Benwell, G., & Pillai, P. (2008). Measuring eCommerce website success. ACIS 2008 Proceedings, 24.

Hendricks. (2015). Understanding The Full Impact Of Web Design On SEO, Branding, And More. Available: http://www.forbes.com/sites/drewhendricks/2015/02/11/understanding-the-full-impact-of-web-design-on-seo-branding-and-more/. Last accessed 21st April 2015.

Lake. (2014). 44 Reasons Why People Don’t Trust Your Site. Available: https://econsultancy.com/blog/64870-44-reasons-why-people-don-t-trust-your-website. Last accessed 16th April 2015.

Lovin. (2014). Lessons Learned From Redesigning the Buffer Homepage. Available: https://blog.bufferapp.com/lessons-learned-from-redesigning-the-buffer-home-page. Last accessed 15th April 2015.

Morrissey. (2012). Why Publishers Should Rethink Their Web Design.Available: http://digiday.com/publishers/why-publishers-should-rethink-design/. Last accessed 15th April 2015.

Sillence, Briggs, Fishwick, & Harris, (2004). Trust and mistrust of online health sites. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 663-670). ACM.

Spool. (2002). Determining How Design Affects Branding. Available: http://www.uie.com/articles/design_and_branding/. Last accessed 21st April 2015.

Stewart. (2014). 6 More Tips to Attract and Keep Older Web Users.Available: https://econsultancy.com/blog/65346-six-more-tips-to-attract-and-keep-older-web-users. Last accessed 16th April 2015.

Romaniuk, Jenni and Gaillard, Elise: ‘The relationship between unique brand associations, brand usage and brand performance: analysis across eight categories’, Journal of Marketing Management, 23 (3/4) (2007), pp. 267–84.

Rosen, D. E., & Purinton, E. (2004). “Website design: Viewing the web as a cognitive landscape”. Journal of Business Research, 57(7), 787-794.