The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic changed the daily life for everyone worldwide and it created some new norm actions that we might not even think about it before, e.g., wearing a face mask when you are out, keeping social distance of 1 to 1.5 meters with your colleagues in your workplace and cannot having any social gatherings with more than certain number of people. Online shopping is not something new, however it gains popularity when COVID-19 outbreak started and becomes the new default way of getting our necessity for most of us, especially during the lockdown that might take place anytime, anywhere.
In Singapore, the tremendous increase in demand for online shopping encourages most of the local firms to join the Ecommerce platform and reduce the impact the pandemic brings to the the business. In this blog, I am going to talk about 2 online shopping applications on mobile browsers, one is Get It by Changi Recommends and the other one is Zalora Singapore. We will discuss about the UX experience that customers have based on the interface and also the usability aspect of both applications.
Let’s take a look with the interface of the application first; Get It by Changi Recommends has a home Interface with cluttered products categories on the top of it and takes up almost half of the screen size of the mobile browsers. It requires the customers always scroll down the page to view the promotion offered currently. The same cluttered products categories layout used in almost every single page of the application and customers have to spend more times to search and view the products they would like to get. It will frustrate the customers as it’s more time consuming for them to view the products on mobile browsers. In addition, there are lots of white space between the top and bottom of the interface. It’s not only irritated the customers, it also confused them as they are not sure are all the products loaded on the page or something went wrong with some products not showing up on the page itself.
The inconsistent interface of the sign up and login page also increase the customer confusion. The page itself doesn’t looks similar to other pages of the application, customers will worry they click on some suspicious spam links which lead them to submit their personal and finance details to some unknown website. The inconsistency confuse the customers that they are not stay with the same application and might move to other applications to get the products.
The sign up as a new member function of the application does not seems to work as intended too. All the buttons disabled right after customers click on the Sign Up button. There are no message shows up to let the customers know they have register as a new member successfully. Customers will not like the idea not knowing the next action they should take. Some might even try to sign up again to make sure they do so successfully.
In the products page itself, there is no product description and other details to let the customers know more about the product. Customers will find it annoying if they will need to search in other pages to know more about it. The lack of the description and details also not able to encourage more customers to try on the new product.
We have so far discussed about the bad UX and interaction design from Get it by Changi Recommends. Let’s move on to Zalora Singapore and see how’s the good UX and interaction design provides a better online shopping experience to the customers. In Zalora Singapore, the home interface looks sleek and clean, customers can view the current promotion available clearly without much scrolling in the mobile browsers. The info fit in perfectly on mobile browsers and customers can have their online shopping by using mobile browser without download the app or do so on a desktop or laptop.
The consistent interface applied to every single page of the application and it gains the customer trust. They feel secure to browse the products and get the products through their application. The login page having the consistent layout and customer can rest assure that they are not being redirected to some other suspicious website.
In the product page itself, customer can view the product and check out everything about the product without much hassle to get the product details from elsewhere. It creates a pleasant online shopping experience to the customers as they can interact with the application and able to make their purchase easily.
With comparison of bad and good UX and interaction design of 2 applications, we can tell that good UX and interaction design able to provides a better online shopping experience to the customers. It allows customer to have better interaction with the application without the need-to-know lots of details to purchase a product.
