For a long time, online businesses have operated through traditional commerce. However, a new phenomenon, the e-commerce front-end, has registered huge uptake by online businesses. The E-commerce front-end refers to all a customer interacts with when they land on your website. It is client-side and determines the overall look and feel of an online experience. There is a need to focus on user experience (UX) if success is to be guaranteed.
When migrating to headless eCommerce, there is a need to focus on user experience (UX) to achieve success. You can accomplish that by creating a highly focused mental state among the users. A highly focused mental state is where an individual is thoroughly captivated by a sensation of energized attention, complete involvement, and satisfaction while executing an activity. Businesses must ensure that their headless frontend causes complete absorption of users’ activities and a lost sense of time and space by the users, to succeed. The following comprises significant points for ensuring a highly focused UX design to succeed.
Goals’ Precision
As a developer, it is your job to ensure that every phase the user requires has transparent objectives. The goal should possess a motivating effect that conveys the likely accomplishment of a product or interface to the user. Generally, users are not in the business of knowing the product’s architecture but are interested in what the product or user interface can accomplish for them.
As a developer, you should provide concise goals in each phase throughout the interaction. You should provide users with fulfilling guidance to encourage them to work towards achieving what they intend to do. That works by ensuring that the users remain focused and not confused in the process of interaction. Once the purpose the business wants to achieve through the product is apparent to a user, they put their all towards achieving the goal and will slowly enter the state of flow.
Timely and Prized Feedback
You must provide users with good feedback. Offer sensible outcomes at a reasonable period to allow users to recognize their position in the current user flow.
Naturally, everyone admires people who can provide instant feedback. Well-timed and valuable feedback is one of the critical requisites for consumers to join the state of flow. Significantly, you should provide a clear distinction between positive and negative feedback.
Positive feedback involves asserting the user’s activities, dismissing a user’s concerns, and founding user confidence. Timely affirmative feedback such as; ‘message sent,’ ‘comment posted,’ and others can offer the user an enjoyable experience, enabling the user to subconsciously build a wonderful feeling about the product.
On the other hand, negative feedbacks imply a response to improper input, errors of operation, or essential negative information provided by the product. Examples of negative feedback are ‘cannot find the user,’ ‘not connected to the internet,’ and ‘password too long.’ However, negative feedback should be regulated because excess negative feedback can have a counteraction influencing interactive consciousness’ flow.
Gamification
The utilization of entertainment to attract and preserve users’ interests plus emotional needs is a genius move. Gamification design is vital in stimulating the flow. Designers should realize that the game and the product design are integrated.
Gamification is realized by allowing users to partake in a gamified prospect and obtain results via their exertions. The gamification design makes users more fascinated by the product, such that their level of interest rises considerably, therefore, encouraging the consumer’s flow experience.
A Significant Level of Absorption
You can achieve the level of absorption or concentration through underlining content, avoiding interruptions, and including functional animation to maintain the consumer’s focus on the product without external factors’ interferences.
To maintain the high concentration level of consumers, you can make the design centered on content. You can start by placing the vital and key content first, then create a clear visual language, eliminate inappropriate information noise and prioritize important information.
What follows would be preventing interruption of the consumer flow as it may result in a bad user experience. Designers should work on ensuring a smooth UX workflow. Consumers are constantly influenced and can consider returning to the earlier state before.
Also, you can invent functional animation, where you get to enhance users’ extent of concentration through vibrant interactions. Appropriate motions go a long way in immersing a customer in the present scene. Hence, the animation must have a specific purpose. The vibrant animations must be in line with interactive behaviors and facilitative in enabling users to understand particular functions.
Sense of Control
Allowing users to continue experiencing success while utilizing your product enhances users’ self-efficacy, therefore retaining their gratification. Being in control provides a feeling of security. Since people like being in control, designers should leverage this psychological behavior.
The headless front-end designs should enable users to think that product changes match their anticipations, are in control of product alterations, and get the outcomes they are looking for. To instill a sense of control, you can do so by matching the users’ expectations, which helps validate users’ instincts and develop significant trust in the product.
You can also use white lies or control illusion, as it is commonly known. Deception seems to be working among users as designers leverage it to boost a smooth user experience.
Conclusion
User experience (UX) is vital in ensuring the success of the headless front-end. Businesses should focus on UX in the e-commerce front-end to facilitate success. To enhance user experience, ensure your goals are clear, give timely and valuable feedback, use gamification, ensure significant concentration level, and instill a sense of control in the users.
