I’ve never been a fan of website templates. Half the time they may look good but experience wise, they can be horrible because they lack user experience. If you’ve not heard of user experience, simple to say it’s about designing a good experience for the user.
How do you design an experience?
Well, in short it’s making the user’s life easy and mindless to fulfill the objectives they need to accomplish. By Wikipedia’s definition, user experience is:
User experience design is a subset of the field of experience design that pertains to the creation of the architecture and interaction models that impact a user’s perception of a device or system.
Source: Wikipedia
Shopping Cart is below the line
Whenever you add an item to your shopping cart, you’d like to keep track of it. Therefore, users would expect it to be in the most convenient place it can be referred and access.
That’s why I consider placing it below the line one of the worst e-commerce design mistakes to avoid. Especially if you’ve a lot of clutter in the area it’s positioned.
If there isn’t a shopping cart list, ensure the shopping cart button is clear and by default, should display the:
- Number of items
- Total amount
- Link to view all items
- Checkout link
What other bad e-commerce experiences have you had?
Yes, you are right! The cart button is one of the most important asset on e-commerce sites.
Just to share (not sure whether you guys have read this), a great article on e-commerce usabillity:
http://www.ecommerceoptimization.com/articles/ecommerce-shopping-cart-usability-21-best-practices/
Hey, crunch. A very good article on e-commerce. Thanks for sharing that. :)