Top Magento Mobile App Design and Development Mistakes We Keep Coming Across
Global eCommerce did $3.54 trillion in 2019 and will hit $6.54 trillion by 2022. As you’d expect, savvy webmasters want a piece of that cake, and they’re betting on top-notch eCommerce platforms for the treat.
In this post, we’ll introduce you to Magento 2 and why it’s often chosen in eCommerce, We’ll walk you through the typical oversights that happen in the course of application development on the platform, as well as give tips on what to avoid when it comes to the design block.
A Few Words About Magento 2
Often Occurring Mistakes with Magento Development & App Design
1. Stuffed UI & Poor UX
2. Not Building for iOS & Android nor Having a PWA
3. Poor User Testing
4. Poor Checkout Experience
5. Loading Speed
Conclusion
Sounds good? Let’s dive in!
Although Magento isn’t the most commonly used eCommerce software platform as of today, albeit, Magento development services are currently experiencing an increase in demand. For starters, the platform is highly customizable and can be basically “carved” right around the specific business needs, especially if the store is complex and large-scale. Moreover, the platform is growing three times faster than its peers. Not to mention that with the termination of the support of the first version of Magento in mid-2020, the tough process of migration to the platform’s second version is simply inevitable.
According to Datanyze and as seen on the screenshot below, Magento does stand behind other platforms in terms of market share and domain number. It is currently behind WooCommerce, Squarespace, and Shopify, it’s market share percentage is 3.35% with more than 70 thousand domains.
Screenshot from Datanyze
Other data that was gathered by Statista suggests that as of spring 2020, Magento holds the 6th position among the leading eCommerce platforms around the globe with a 3.44% market share.
Screenshot from Statista
But don’t rush with conclusions about its position in the lists just yet. Throughout the 4-year period from 2016 to 2020, Magento’s merchant base has grown by a whopping 200%. Which is quite impressive if you consider that it grew by 100% from 2017 through 2018 alone. More so, it’s worth noting that Magento is among the top B2B eCommerce platforms.
And as it was already briefly aforementioned, it’s a great match for large and highly-customizable stores that don’t want to stick to the “standard” template designs. Yes, this does, therefore, imply the work scope of professional developers and designers for building the store (as opposed to tweaking ready-made drag-and-drop blocks).
This is why falling back on the many years of development on both Magento 1 and Magento 2 we’d like to talk about what not to do to make a Magento project successful.
Magento development requires strong technical skills and a very thorough understanding of its navigation principles to craft suitable designs. Thus, not everyone has it rosy with the platform. Magento mobile app developers and designers are making mistakes that cost them conversions and profits. Let’s explore these errors and how they can be fixed.
Cluttering elements can kill your Magento mobile app design before you even get started. So, keep the design simple.
When shopping online, people spend about four minutes on mobile. But they spend five minutes or more on the desktop. Hence, you have minimal time to make your mark on a potential shopper. Don’t kill your chances with clutter.
By all means, you don’t want to create a bland design. That’s counterproductive too. You need to balance things. Specifically, you want your app users to enjoy an interactive experience that leads them to make a purchase.
So, how do you strike a balance? How do you achieve an interactive user interface and avoid clutter? How do you design user experiences that get the click?
Here are a few industry best practices you can use.
In one study, the Baymard Institute found out the following:
“40 percent of eCommerce sites didn’t offer zooming features like double-tap or image pinching.”
Consequently, those websites experienced high bounce rates. According to the study, even those sites that gave close-up versions of their product images, but didn’t support zooming gestures, suffered from poor conversions.
Another issue is using low-resolution images. They are equal to nothing as users can’t see the product’s details. As long as pictures are high-quality and optimized in terms of their size, you are on the right track.
More so, expert Magento developers and mobile app designers indicate clearly that zooming features are present. The Baymard Institute study figured that 50 percent of apps that offered the feature didn’t indicate that they did.
Based on the 2020 Oberlo statistics on M-Commerce sales, the number of sales made from mobile devices only continues to grow, this is clearly seen in the screenshot below.
Screenshot from Oberlo
Although mobile devices drive the most traffic to an online store, buyers often return to their desktops to complete the purchase. That’s where a “Save Items” or “Wishlist” feature comes to play.
Building the “Save Cart” feature (also referred to as the Perpetual Shopping Cart) into your Magento eCommerce app can come in handy in many instances. As sometimes shoppers are not ready to purchase yet, they want to save the cart for later. You also want to send reminder emails at intervals to these shoppers to complete their purchases. More so, it makes sense to put a reminder display on the desktop version to encourage them to complete the checkout steps.
About 75 percent of mobile phone users rely on their thumbs when interacting with their devices. So, your mobile site design should align with that user behavior.
Designing with a focus on the thumb boosts conversion, improves user engagement, and makes navigation easy. This is twice as relevant when working on your progressive web application design.
Screenshot from Alistapart
More so, you want your design to put critical user elements in the Natural area of the “Thumb Zone”. Your users shouldn’t have a hard time accessing anything you’d want to do on your app.
Screenshot from Smashing Magazine
This user behavior is one more reason to declutter your Magento mobile app design. You want users to focus on just a few things at a time because it aligns with how they use their mobile phones. At this point, note that the size of the mobile devices is continually getting larger. This is why placing buttons, menu listings, and other elements closer to the bottom of the mobile screen is considered common practice.
This point on using microinteractions builds on the previous one about designing for the thumb.
Look at the video above. That’s microinteractions in action. A user wants to see what the product looks like in a different color, size, with an extra feature, etc. microinteractions help buyers experience the product in full, without much effort.
But this type of user experience doesn’t stop with product features. Buyers can enjoy the benefits of microinteractions if they can easily rate, like, or compare a product.
The goal here is to provide the user with the most intuitive experience possible.
A lot of Magento mobile app designers and developers do not pay attention to form elements. Not surprisingly, it hurts their conversions.
For example, most developers still use drop-downs in their forms. But a user testing study shows that steppers work better on forms.
It doesn’t end there. Here are a few other UX best practices for form designs:
For this feature, you want to use address lookup, auto-suggestion, and auto-detection to help your users fill out forms and complete data entry activities faster.
Your app users can indicate their address quicker using the address lookup feature. Platforms like Google Places and USPS offer open APIs that can assist you for this purpose.
Auto-suggestions are everywhere. You know them. Google uses them to suggest search queries before you’re done typing your search phrase, and your phone uses it to suggest words to you for auto-correct features.
Savvy designers use this feature to help searchers find products faster in their eCommerce stores. Auto-detection helps your user verify that the data they’ve entered is correct. For example, your customer can see the credit card type they’ve entered during checkout.
No doubt, this is the longest section here. But it is so for a reason. Most designer and developer mistakes come from User Interface and User Experience errors.
One more major user experience error is not prioritizing for Magento search. Make the app’s content highly searchable and the interface search-friendly.
Finally, make the app secure, or nothing else will work. Users are more concerned about security than anything else when shopping via their mobile device. Your users shouldn’t have to guess whether their data is secure or not. Safety and security should be written all over the app. So you want to:
Therefore, since you’re the side that’s responsible for keeping client data safe, more than anything, make sure to go the extra mile with security and data safety, especially if you want to avoid huge fines or lawsuits.
You may have genuine reasons to focus on one platform, and that’s fine if it’s good for your business. But some Magento app designers and developers who choose to concentrate on just one platform do not have a business case for their decisions.
Ideally, you want to build to accommodate growth and let your users shop anywhere they feel comfortable. So build for more than one platform. After all, having your app on iOS and Android is enough in most cases. Almost everyone uses these two mobile platforms.
Wish to pick up your game and move towards a more modern approach? Move in a different direction and choose in favor of PWAs instead of native apps. Being quick, user-friendly, and boasting outstanding features of a native application without the need to be actually downloaded, progressive web apps are currently the next big thing in M-Commerce.
Testing was how LukeW Ideation + Design discovered the form type that converts better. If you ignore user testing, you might optimize content to no end and without nothing to show for it.
Some Magento mobile app designers and developers discount user testing. But different audiences have unique needs and preferences. Testing helps you find out what your audiences want and expect. Thus, consider investing some time in tests.
A huge portion of cart abandonment cases happen right on the checkout step of the order. Big shame. Mentioning the checkout experience mistakes that can cost your business a lot include:
As you can guess, the hazard is immense. To put it differently, out of every ten shoppers that visit an eCommerce site, seven do not buy. But better checkout design leads to a 35 percent boost in conversion rates. This is some food for thought.
Learn how to optimize mobile payments in our guide.
Last but not least, according to a study by Google/Verto, U.S, marketers agree that boosting the speed of their mobile sites and apps improved their conversion rates by 15%. This stat shouldn’t come as a surprise as mobile web pages take much longer to load compared to desktop pages. So compressing your app’s code and file weights can measurably improve your profits.
Learn more about website speed and how to improve it here.
Design determines business success. In the words of Baymard Institute’s researchers whose study was mentioned in the guide,
“Our research suggests the average e-commerce site can improve its conversion rate by 35% solely through design improvements to the checkout process.”
So, if you’re making or have made any of these Magento mobile app design and development mistakes, you can fix them. The keys are in your hands. Use them.
Alex Husar, CTO at Onilab with 8+ years of experience in Magento and Salesforce. He graduated from the Czech Technical University and obtained a bachelor?s degree in Computer Software Engineering. Alex?s expertise includes both full-stack dev skills and a strong ability to provide project-critical guidance to the whole team.
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💡 At Growcode, we develop and maintain online shops and B2B ecommerce on Magento!
