User Journey Map: Personal Shopify UX Analysis - Case Study
Understanding the user experience is crucial for success in digital marketing. The methods that a user uses to interact with and navigate a website can show both the site's strengths and weaknesses. So how can you recognize those key elements when a user leaves a page? Or how can you spot the crucial variations between a situation that resulted in product purchase and those that resulted in cart abandonment? Today I will use my personal Shopify site as an example to analyze the user journey map.
What is a User Journey Map?
A user journey map shows the interactions a user has from the first point of engagement to a specific activity, such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, joining a loyalty program, or participating in any other conversion event of interest. Outlining the user path can assist in locating important touchpoints that either facilitate or obstruct the website's flow. Touchpoints are interactions that have a big impact on how users act and can happen at any stage of the user experience. The complex network of interactions is made simpler and easier to relate to by combining many touchpoints, including website pages, marketing materials, and social media channels, into a single perspective. This is the user journey map I drafted for my personal Shopify site.
Source: XMind ZEN
Now let’s do a breakdown for each step in mobile view.
Home Page
The home page is the page that tells your audience what your brand is and what you are selling. Whether the objective of your homepage is to sell your items or gather email subscribers, every aspect should work toward creating a positive first impression and motivating an intended action. A good home page contains those key aspects:
User Experience: It's critical to keep in mind that the goal of your homepage is to persuade visitors to browse your products and eventually make a purchase. A decent homepage should direct visitors who aren't seeking a specific result while accommodating those who are.
Choose the right Fonts and Color: To create a unified visual aesthetic that encourages brand awareness, the font should coordinate with your current identity. The same is true of your color scheme.
Use Eye-catching Imagery: Your images should catch the user's attention as soon as they land on your website, whether you're attempting to promote a product or collection, gather leads, or both.
So the first part of my home page is the info section that indicates my brand concept and what kind of products I have. Then there is a “shop all” call-to-action button that will take you directly to the product list page.
Then, there is my “Featured Products” section; this section particularly shows some of my special or best-selling products that may attract customers’ interest and attention. Featured products can help best-sellers position themselves on my e-commerce site. For example, my top items can remain on the homepage to give customers quick access. In doing so, I cut down on the time they need to find the right product and make a quick purchase. The main benefits of the featured products are:
Improved product visibility
Product positioning
Improved store revenue
And it shows basic product info such as product name, price, and some promotions. In addition, each of my product links on the featured product will take you directly to the product detail page as well.
The final section of my home page is my collection. In "Collection," you can group your products into collections to make it easier for customers to find them by category. A webpage with a gallery of the products in the collection can be shown on your online store after you establish one. Then, your clients can access a specific product's page by clicking a picture of that product on the collection page. By including links to the collections in a menu in your store's navigation, you can make it easier for customers to search and view collections.
Product Detail Page
A product detail page (PDP) is a web page that outlines everything customers and buyers need to know about a particular product — including information about color, sizing, material, pricing, shipping options, and more. The goal is to combine product information, features, benefits, and photos into a condensed and user-friendly web page that gives online audiences all the information they need to make a purchase and persuades the buyer to finish that transaction. And why is PDP important? Product detail pages are important because users don’t buy when product information is either incomplete or incorrect. The quality of your PDP has a big influence on the outcome of a sale.
Each element of a successful product description page contributes to an informative and engaging shopping experience. The following are some characteristics of outstanding PDPs:
Menu
Search Bar
Product Images
Product Title
Product Description
Additional product details
Breadcrumbs
Price
Call-to-action
Shipping Info
Policies
Conversion/Checkout
Converting browsers into actual customers is one of an e-commerce store's major challenges. Making it happen on your e-commerce site depends in large part on your checkout page. The customer's pleasure and likelihood to return are both impacted by the checkout process. Cart abandonment, though, is what stands in the way. A staggering 69.8% of shopping carts are abandoned on average, according to records. Even though the majority of consumers enjoy shopping online, why do so many of them give up in the middle of a transaction? As it turns out, there are several causes for this:
Hidden costs, such as shipping costs that are not mentioned upfront
Forced to create an account
A complicated and lengthy checkout process
Insufficient payment methods
Your bottom line is impacted by cart abandonment since it represents missed income. Even though you can't totally prevent cart abandonment, there are some best practices you can adhere to improve the checkout process and increase conversion rates. Long-term benefits will come from continuously improving the checkout process, which is perhaps the most important cogwheel of the purchasing process. These best practices will assist you in getting started in the lengthy and continuing process of improving the checkout experience, and you can then conduct additional experiments to determine what works best for you.
Conclusion
And that is all of my user journey map analysis. A storytelling tool called a user journey map provides a comprehensive overview of significant trends and patterns across various user encounters. I hope this brief introduction to user journey maps has introduced you to a new tool that improves your understanding of marketing objectives and the user experience.
