If you’re an e-commerce store owner or about to set up an e-commerce store then this videos for you! I’m gonna take you through some different examples of how products are displayed and how that has an impact on me, in my user experience! Is it going to lead me through to a purchase decision, or is it going to leave me away from the site in a disappointed manner.
So I’ve been fully launched into doing a renovation at home, and as part of that process we’ve been searching and searching for different tiles for our kitchen and bathroom and all of that really interesting stuff! I find it quite good and I really enjoy the experience, but, I do get frustrated online when I know that my user experience could be so much better. So let’s look at four different examples of websites and see how they deliver their product online and what impact think about the impact it has on you, as you move through the site.
This first one is a standard ecommerce store you can see you know just lists of products but the tile images themselves give me no sense of size, texture, feel. A little bit of colour I know that’s sort of like a funny dark blue color. Here’s a green one.. apple gloss and vibrant green, but I don’t get a sense of the tile at all. If I click in and have a look at this tile, again the image is blurred I get no sense of feel and touch and experience with this product, I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time on this site unfortunately and sorry Tile Mob, I’m not really engaged in your website.
Let’s take a look at another example this is the “Builders Discount Warehouse”. Now some of these, they’ve got a really difficult situation, there are thousands of tiles they’re turning over stock all the time. So they’ve got to come up with a way to present their product. You know a lot of e-commerce stores have thousands of products, how do you present your products so that it actually gives a meaningful visual connection at a subconscious level with the user.
So let’s have a look at these guys. These guys have done photos of their showroom floor, like kind of it’s a next step up from the previous one but I don’t really get a sense of size, texture, a little bit of texture and all the color variations have popped down the bottom there, again, it’s not a great experience yes I could buy online but it’s pretty standard stuff it’s like hey no we’re just gonna grab some photos and stuff it in there and see how we go. Sorry “Builders discount warehouse”, again not a great experience I didn’t spend a lot of time on your site. So if I move across two National Tiles, National Tiles these guys you know the all their advertising is all about price and quality, and at best price guaranteed kind of stuff. They’ve done something really interesting with their photos they used a hand to position and give perspective to the tile, so what that means is they haven’t needed to display the dimensions of the tile, you immediately get a subconscious connection with what the tile… how it looks and its size of its texture just from the position of the hand.
It’s actually a really a good way to deliver a bunch of different tiles. Here’s a good example… I would never have thought, take that hand away, that tile could be this big versus this big, so the hand immediately gives it a sense of size. Same with all of these, so yeah and the prices is nice big, I know when I’m moving around, it’s gonna give me. I know what I’m doing! So that’s one experience now have a look at this these guys this is SC Ceramics.
They’re a wholesale tile producer and they’ve created this visualizer. It takes user experience to a whole other level, and wait till you see this. So I mean, I’m choosing my kitchen it allows me to go “yeah I want a kitchen” this is very similar to our my kitchens kind of look. And I get to choose their product type, so I like these ‘Artisan tiles’ let’s have a look at how these artisan tiles look, so it’s dumped these tiles into the kitchen! I can instantly see what it’s going to look like! I get a real feel immersive experience for these tiles in the page.
Let’s change the type of color of the tile, look at that! That is awesome! I get a total feel for the tile so this is done with renders, I don’t think they built thousands of kitchens, they have used rendering software to produce hundreds and hundreds of images all the different combinations, but the investment is totally worth it! I am so invested in this product.
So I can move through to the next step I can choose different color or styles and it changes all right through the process, and then my I can do different shades of tile, dark through to different contrast, all of that sort of thing. I can zoom in if I want to. You know I’m really gonna have a look at this image right I close. It’s just brilliant! At the end of the process I know I’m now going from “Marrakech mistletoe light style” tile gives me the product. So the only thing missing from this page is a “purchase from our stock”, or “find a stockist” and feed them through to the particular store to buy online. But as far as an immersive process this is just spectacular! So how are you presenting your products online, and really giving you WOW factor to your online store environment? If you need to get them into your showroom then you need to be really thinking about how your products are wrapped up in a nice presentable user engagement, right from the start, right from your online store environment and feeding through into your showrooms.