There’s a quiet revolution happening within e-commerce design. Two worlds known for colliding (often with catastrophic results) are forging ahead in a way that promises to transform the development of online engagement. At last the disciplines of UX and design are merging to create informed and positive designs for brands that are either re-platforming or refreshing their online presence.

The Big Bang

Traditionally brands that change their e-commerce sites have done so for one of two reasons. Firstly, because their existing platform is too complex to run, is inflexible or doesn’t meet their business growth expectations, so they implement a new platform. Secondly, because the design is so painfully out of date that nobody within the organisation can bear to look at it, leading to a complete redesign.

However, this approach can implode. For example, in 2012 the move to a new platform by Finish Line, a US multichannel shoe and apparel retailer, had such a negative impact on their key performance indicators that they rolled back to their old site after just 17 days of trading, costing them (by their estimates) $3 million in lost sales. Two years later, after spending a reported, and jaw-dropping, £150 million moving platform, Marks and Spencer’s online sales dropped by 8% and led to a swathe of customer complaints.

In both cases, a worsened customer experience as a result of a major redesign was cited as one of the key reasons.

Beauty vs. brains

When web design first bubbled up to the surface as a discipline, two quite distinct groups of people jockeyed for position. The artists with grounding in static graphic design, created rich but grindingly slow websites that were confusing and hard to use. The scientists, on the other hand, created lightning fast, intuitive sites that looked, well, uninspiring at best and shocking at worst.

Ultimately it’s the scientists who have probably edged ahead - think of the early simplicity of Google and the all-pervasive Wikipedia. But, either way, there has been tension between the two disciplines.

Fortunately, as the market has matured so has the appreciation of what both talent pools can bring to the redesign process. Those on both sides recognise the need for greater synergy and have worked together to reverse this unproductive and costly process.

Google now has a large and world-renowned creative department who work on all products. That's why all their offerings look so good. Google is a great example of successful harmony between art and science - brains and beauty.

Retailers, particularly those whose products have major visual appeal, have to be able to show products in all their glory online. And that means fusing the best creative with the best UX. Beauty and brains working together.

The evolution revolution

The problem with the 'Big Bang' approach is it is hard to know what will work until after launch - and that, as we have seen, can be painfully expensive. The best defence has been to play safe, to avoid anything revolutionary that while it may improve performance, may not.

There is another way, though, by taking an incremental approach, or what we call ‘evolutionary design’, brands get what they need, not what they are told they need.

Ensuring the means justifies the end

At the centre of the evolutionary approach lies A/B testing which allows retailers to test alternative design variations of page elements against the live site (the control) to know which of the proposed improvements (whether small or outrageous) deliver the best user experience and trading performance, long before adopting them.

Crucially there’s an additional skill-set to throw into the mix, 'optimisation experts' who understand how to devise the testing plan, build the actual A/B tests and analyse the results.

Data doesn’t lie, it’s not emotionally connected to a certain look and feel and it gives UX and creative teams the information they need to ensure the redesign effort stays on purpose while mitigating and minimising risk.

Evolutionary design enables you to be more creative, be more radical and get ahead of competitors, rather than copy them - and it’s a far more cost-effective and less risky way of doing things.

 

By Chris Gibbins, director of user experience and optimisation, and Rory Woods, head of creative, at Biglight

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