e-Commerce Ascension Series: Holistic Architecture (II)

Building your digital presence is challenging, even for veteran players in the e-Commerce arena. In times of abundant content and users’ limited attention spans, it’s hard to rise above the sea of spam on your clients’ newsfeeds.

Holistic Architecture proposes a shift in the digital design paradigm, empowering both the website’s UI & especially UX.

The key to digital sales is a very easy-to-follow pipeline of desired actions. You want to guide the user through their cognitive buying process, which I will explain later. If the user lands on your website and has difficulty deciding what to press to fulfill the wanted action, they will leave. e-Commerce giants call this the rule of four seconds. If the user can’t find the button they want to press in four seconds, they feel stupid and leave your website. So basically, your UX, supported by your UI, must help your user feel tech-savvy.

What is the user’s map of decisions to compare and contrast when prompted with your product? The first is if they want to click on your ad or not. That’s the whole purpose of marketing, getting people to land on your website. From there, it’s all about UI&UX.

As promised, I will explain the cognitive process of the typical buyer. The average customer will likely land on your website from a social media advertisement. The mental process must be analyzed to understand better what happened in your user’s mind, and through empathy, you should put yourself in their shoes to learn what shortcomings your project has. When people reach a website, they are usually assaulted with pop-up ads trying to catch their attention. Maybe pop-ups used to work, but nowadays, people developed the ability to block and filter content mentally. Just think about the speed it takes you to decide if a post on your newsfeed is worthy of your attention. Now add the factor that people might want to fool you into buying stuff you don’t need. That’s right. You scroll past posts that aren’t insightfully designed to capture your interest. So why would a website browsing experience be any different?

Your e-Commerce website must have excellent UX design to harness the power of holistic architecture. This implies the abovementioned step of empathizing with the client and going through the customer journey. Make notes of every action needed from the landing page to the confirmed order. Count them, analyze them, and reduce their number to the minimum.

Pro tip

Every step is a decision the user must make. At every mental decision crossroads, the user can abandon their journey on your website. This creates the all-feared issue of a high abandoned cart rate, which has ridden the e-Commerce sites.

If you get the hang of holistic architecture, all the other steps of the e-Commerce Ascension™ will become more accessible. The template is not just a powerful tool to increase your e-Commerce performance. It’s a mindset that allows people like you and me to gaze through the lens of consumer behavior and successfully apply the insight gathered.