Let’s face it; for many of us in our current world, one of our greatest problems is sensory overload. We are constantly being bombarded with all manner of visual content and data, and all the while, we are having to constantly make decisions – both big ones and small ones.
This has certain implications for how you design your brand’s ecommerce website. Your target audiences will have little patience for navigational menus, for example, that make it tricky for them to find the information they’re seeking. They have to make a decision on whether to remain on your website, or click that browser ‘back’ button and head elsewhere.
This brings us onto the subject of ‘micro-decisions’, which will play a big role in the success or failure of your e-tail portal’s efforts to convert visitors into buyers.
What are micro-decisions?
For ‘micro-decisions’, one might also use the term ‘micro-conversions’; they’re the smaller decisions that might lead to a sale (or not, as the case may be).
Good examples of successful micro-conversions on your site may include such actions as signing up to receive emails from your brand, or registering for your site’s rewards scheme. Racking up these micro-conversions can help ensure your store gains more and more trust from the given site visitor. That, in turn, could maximise the chances of an eventual sale.
But of course, it’s also possible that micro-decisions made by your site visitors might not be favourable to your store. One of the things it is crucial to remember about micro-decisions, is that they really are made almost instantaneously, without the site visitor in question necessarily stopping to think much about it.
Think back to the last time you landed on a website which left you unsure whether that site was even relevant to your needs. The chances are that you would have spent very little time deciding; if it wasn’t immediately obvious to you what the given site was, who it was aimed at, and what benefit was in it for you, there’s a strong likelihood that you simply left the site.
So, what impact will this have when you are considering navigation options?
What your awareness of micro-decisions should do, is motivate you to do everything possible to make your online store’s navigation easy to use. Your site needs to make your visitors’ decision-making processes really simple, because those decisions could be stepping stones to them actually buying from you.
Any one of those decisions could be to leave your site. So, it’s really important to make your site’s navigation straightforward even for those who might already be convinced of the value of your products or services.
That is likely to mean, for instance, not adding a link to every single page of your website in your top navigational bar, which will help you avoid overwhelming your visitors’ brains. Instead, you might choose to have three or four different navigational bars in different parts of your website.
Such a system could involve the use of a main top navigational menu, a second menu accessible via a ‘hamburger’ icon in the top left-hand corner of the page, and finally a third menu in the site’s footer.
And it could make sense for those second and third menus to be more detailed in their navigational options than the first menu, given that if the visitor looks at them at all, they will have effectively already decided to seek further information. They will be wanting to see more detail, so they won’t feel so overwhelmed or deterred if these secondary menus are bigger than the first one.
The navigation system that you use for your website, then, needs to reflect how human brains behave – including their drive for easy-to-understand information. A journey from simple to detailed could therefore help maximise sales for your online store.
With our expertise in ecommerce website design, graphic design, search engine optimisation, and CRM systems in Gibraltar, our team at Piranha Designs is well-placed to assist you in improving your brand’s online impact. Please do not hesitate to contact us today for further details and advice.
