Ecommerce and Retail • Ecommerce Design
Design Trends to Grow Your Ecommerce Business 2019
23 Jan 2019 • 9 min read
As the modern world seems to accelerate to greater speeds with each passing year, it’s crucial to maintain the same pace if you want your ecommerce store to stay fresh and competitive.
2019 will bear a multitude of new web design trends, many of which can be utilized to increase your online store’s conversions. While there are many tried and tested web design practices that you should employ, the future of website design is fast arriving, and with our guidance, you can utilize the latest practices to grab the attention of your users and effortlessly guide them to a sale.
Here are some of the top web design trends of 2019 that you can use for your ecommerce store.
While the use of video has been steadily increasing over the last couple of years, it’s likely to explode in 2019. Video is predicted to comprise a whopping 82% of web traffic by 2022.
When produced to a great standard, it’s an incredibly effective form of communication - consider the comprehension speed of video compared to reading through paragraphs of text (which people rarely do).
Video clips can also be much more engaging than other forms of content, increasing the chance that your customers will actually watch and comprehend your information. And as a bonus, the additional time spent on your site also helps to improve your SEO!
Under the right circumstances, video backgrounds have shown to increase conversions for landing (including home) pages. They grab your attention, and keep hold of you until they’re done. This is why production quality is so important.
Some other great uses for video include:
While video can yield some awesome benefits, it’s important that they aren’t too long, and should be muted by default, giving your customers the opportunity to ignore the video if they’d prefer to browse other areas of the page.
Serif fonts are typically used in print, and have “feet” (serifs) at the ends of some letters. Sans serif fonts - on the other hand - are feet-less and cleaner-looking.
Up until the last 5 years or so, sans serif fonts have been the default choice for web-text, as they were more legible on standard, lower quality screens. Higher-resolution screens have since become affordable, so serif fonts and their stylish flairs are now open for use.
Since serif fonts are naturally more decorative, they can breathe life and style into your web pages. The effect of the new font style can be impressive when used as large heading text, where they become distinct and emphasized, clearly standing out on the page.
Two highly popular services have recently adopted serif fonts into their platforms - prominent blogging platform Medium use serif fonts for their article headers, and email marketing giant Mailchimp recently added a sleek, modern-looking font as their large heading text.
With industry leaders adopting this approach, you can be sure that others will follow.
Micro interactions are short, quirky movements that occur after an action. Motion can imbue your webstore with emotional character, making it feel like a living thing with a personality of its own.
Micro interactions are fantastic for UX because they provide instant, understandable feedback for an action: I clicked this, it did something cool, and then it completed.
When done properly, these simple, effective animations can delight your customers, and we believe that 2019 will be a year in which they’ll proliferate.
As with video, micro interactions are motion-based, which makes them eye-catching. For this reason, it’s important to exercise some caution - keep them short and sweet, and try not to add too many of them.
Most of us love a natter, especially in the form of messaging apps. This is why Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and other major messaging platforms have billions of users. It’s also a factor in the emerging success of virtual assistants such as Alexa and Google Home.
In the world of ecommerce, chatbots can help to satisfy our fondness for messaging by allowing engaging, real-time conversation to find products or information.
This is a return to trading of old, in which merchants used conversation to barter and wrangle their way to great deals.
Chatbots are entirely automated, and need to be pre-programmed in order to respond accurately to the user. A selection of options can be offered by the chatbot, or it can respond to certain keywords from the customer. This happens throughout the conversation until the customer has (hopefully) found what they're looking for. Setting up chatbots can take some time, but have proved a success for large companies such as Marriott International and Capital One Financial.
You can even communicate with a company’s chatbot directly in Facebook Messenger, without having to even visit the webstore.
While real-life people will continue to be needed for more complex problems (don’t worry, the robots aren’t taking over), chatbots can be a great way to offer simple problem resolution, increasing your conversions as a result.
| Related Reading: Ecommerce Predictions 2019
Most sites are built on grid systems - a satisfying, ordered structure that allows web designers to quickly create sites. Nature, by contrast, is much more random and free-flowing, which is why using natural shapes in your design can evoke soothing familiarity.
Grids are great for structure, but not so great for mimicking what we’re most comfortable with: our natural world.
Using natural shapes such as circles, triangles and hexagons in your design can offer a startling contrast against the rigid grid system, providing a beautiful depth to your webstore. They also look damn cool.
For example, Neto's Geometric Theme uses circles throughout it's design.
Augmented reality is the ability to superimpose an image onto a real-world view. In terms of ecommerce, this might mean seeing how a fetching new coffee machine looks in your kitchen by holding your iPad in front of the desired space, or doing the same with a plush sofa in your lounge.
Being able to position products in the real-world is a technology with tons of potential - a recent study found that 71% of shoppers would shop at a retailer more often if they offered augmented reality.
Keeping up with web design trends is imperative if you want to succeed - implementing the current trends for 2019 will help you to achieve that. Whether it’s the use of conversational chatbots, beautiful serif fonts, or awesome micro interactions, you can be sure that your webstore will be fresher than Will Smith in the 90’s.
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Interested in learning more about website design for ecommerce? Check out our blog The Power of Good Website Navigation or check our these Inspiring Design examples.
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