Thinking outside the cart
Who says ecommerce sites must be boring?
At my day job, I'm not just a Ruby on Rails developer, I'm also UI designer and User Experience guru. In fact, I got started in this industry doing design. So, I keep an eye out for interesting and exciting new things that I see. I'd like to share a couple interesting uses of technology that really spice up user experience and might just sell a few more units.
I'm always amazed at how cookie cutter a lot of e-commerce sites are. You're got your product listings (with search), you've got your product detail page, your add to cart button, your checkout process, etc. And a lot of times, these are pretty boring and just like every other e-commerce site.
First a caveat, sometimes this similarity is good. In fact, a lot of the time it's good. Massive deviations from this pattern can be a bad thing, because users have been trained on this process by Amazon and the other big e-tailors. The first rule of good UI design is to, in fact, fulfill the expectations of your users. If they click "add to cart", they should probably receive feedback that such action was successful.
Going outside the cart
Keeping all this in mind, lets take a look at a few examples of going "outside the cart", sucessfully and in ways that made the users's experience better.
Our first example is from Panic software. A boutique Mac software company. They have a nice little ecommerce system for selling their software and swag.
This is a great little shopping cart. They have a small div that sticks to the bottom of the screen, and either clicking the "+" icon, or dragging the product you want, adds it to the cart instantly via AJAX. There's no need for a page reload, no "this product has been added to your cart" or anything like that. Quick, simple, elegant.
Another great example is from Madewell. They don't actually sell their clothes on the site, but their product pages are fabulous.
Putting your mouse over the image activates its and it moves around. And almost every page has video of the same model and clothing getting up and moving around. It's all seamless and fantastically done. They don't have a bunch of tiny boxes representing thumbnails, they don't have a "zoom" function, or any of the things you're used to seeing on product pages, there's no need. This is a great example of how to break the paradigms we're all used to with a little creativity and in a way that really impacts the user's experience.
These are just two examples of the little(or big) things we could all do that our users would appreciate. Will they work for everyone? No. Certainly video on each page won't work if you sell a catalog of 1 million auto parts. But it wouldn't hurt to step outside of the cart here and there and think about how to bend or break the current paradigms and maybe, just maybe, sell a couple more units.
