Rhythm in Designing for UX

I think title of the blog may seems odd I am talking about the rhythm and even in the website or mobile app designing. No, definitely it is not wrong at all because I am talking about the rhythm of user experiences.

Rhythm in Design

When our user begins her journey in your design, she should have consistent user experiences. Things must go easy, comfortable, familiar (if not should be guided properly), and quickly. We shouldn't leave any space to think your user more on any step, she should have easy flow with your UIs and should have smooth interactions with your design, layout, etc. These are the things I refer as rhythm in design.

When we talk about the user interfaces in website or mobile app, the subject become wide and out of scope of this blog to cover. Therefore, today I shall talk about only the e-commerce website or mobile app that is offering checkout process because that is the most critical step in e-commerce designing as the highest percentage of shoppers abandon cart on these steps only.

Let's see what we should consider in order to keep the rhythm of our users during checkout process.

Overall Presentation of E-commerce

The journey or our user is beginning with the entry on the landing page, be it home page, product page, or any other page on the e-commerce storefront. Therefore, if you site doesn't have good presentation and consistency throughout all pages or UIs, your visitor will feel break in her rhythm.

Therefore, determine design consistency and user experiences on entire site or app first so you will keep rhythm of browsing intact until your shopper is reaching the checkout process steps after deciding about the purchase of your products. Once your shopper enters on the checkout page or UI, please remove all other clutters, and obstacles from the pages.

User Experiences on Checkout Pages

For instance, recently I have purchased something from a reputed e-commerce site and found unusual difficulties during entire process. Until I reached at the checkout page or stage the overall website experiences were great and on the checkout page I was greeted by friendly UI elements and presentations about the products, their features, and relevant products available on the storefront.

I was pleased to know all these things and after reading all those stuff, I have inserted my card to make purchase and accomplished all signing in process. Oops! At the end I had a slip of statement that was talking about the failure of payment due to time-out.

Placing Obstacles in User Journey

Yes, I lost my valuable time of purchase in reading pleasant, but unnecessary stuff before finishing my credit card sign in process. Now, I have to reinvent the wheel again and pass through all purchasing process, except leaving that distracting reading material. This experiences have taught me to remover clutter and other obstacle from the checkout pages or UI in order to accomplish the buying tasks immediately.

Other experience was with highly crowded user interfaces, inconsistent styles of the UI, and unbalanced compositions of UI elements.

Crowded Interfaces

For instance, on one page, I found tight page grid, small copy that conveys nothing, and lack of enough white space to breath. These things have broken my web browsing rhythm and I left that page immediately. In another case, e-commerce web designer had used red/orange grid lines and some links with same red colors. That had made me to think about something had done wrong in my previous step and I gone back to confirm that.

Unconventional Design

In one more experience, I found form field behaving in non-standard ways and causing shoppers to annoy. In short, if you haven't tested your product frequently and in real conditions with real use cases, you may have committed the sin of breaking the browsing rhythms of your visitors and would lost business in long run.

If you want to save your dream e-commerce designing project from such rhythm breaking experiences contact us by considering us a your dependable partner.