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10 Examples of Great Mobile UX Design: Lessons for Ecommerce

If the user experience on your mobile site (or app) is poor, then you’re potentially closing the door to quite a large number of customers. A bad mobile UX will hold back your online store in terms of conversions, sales, and repeat custom.

Most people are using their mobiles as their main means of accessing the internet — you REALLY don’t want to miss out on all that potential traffic. To inspire you to improve your own mobile UX strategy, here are 10 examples of brilliant mobile UX design, from ecommerce sites to fitness apps.

1. Shutterfly

As soon as you access the Shutterfly website on your phone, you’re greeted with a selection of beautiful, high quality images representing different product categories. (Shutterfly prints photobooks and other related products). The beautiful images they use do a good job of conveying information about the brand, while also being nice to look at and intuitively guiding the user to different parts of the store. A good example of how a visual UX can help drive sales on mobile — by instantly giving the user plenty of products to choose from.

Make sure your online store is built out with visual category markers such as icons or photography for mobile users.

2. Domino’s Pizza

When people order a pizza, it will be because they’re feeling tired or because they want a treat and they don’t want to have to work hard for their dinner. As Domino’s is a pizza delivery service, it’s important that their mobile UX is as easy and convenient as possible. And it is probably the easiest process imaginable. People enter information about their favorite type of pizza, then they click a button, and the order is automatically placed. You literally have to press a single button when you want pizza — a great example on on-demand UX that puts consumers first.

Keep thinking about how you can further simplify the customer journey — are you still striving for convenience? How can you save them more time?

3. Google Maps

Functional can be beautiful.

Google Maps is perhaps one of the handiest apps to ever grace mobile screens. It’s easy for people to turn their mobile phone into a satnav when they use Google Maps, making it easier than ever for people to travel to new places. Whether users are travelling via foot or by car, it can provide specialized directions to reflect their needs. They just need to look down at the screen to see where they are on the map and where they’re going, or be guided by the voice navigation. Google is famous for its mobile-first thinking and AI-assisted technology — a great example of UX that’s focused on function, not form.

You should keep testing your site’s or your app’s functions to ensure they are robust enough for your customers’ needs. Do you need to include more voice-assisted elements?

4. Hipmunk

This app has been designed to make travel a lot easier and it does so by offering many convenient features and making the UX as personal as possible. They make it possible for customers to book flights and hotels, tailoring each booking to match their individual needs and setting notifications in regards to the availability of certain things. The fact that the app is both comprehensive and accommodating is what makes Hipmunk’s UX so great — and personalizing the purchase journey makes customers feel valued and heard.

5. Facebook

Kind of an obvious one, but what does Facebook provide? A means of keeping in touch with friends, a regular supply of content tailored to match your interests, and notifications about interactions with friends, upcoming events, and birthdays. It doesn’t get much better than that, does it? There’s a good reason why so many people are using Facebook (speaking of which, be sure to read our recent article on getting in touch with Facebook). The secret to Facebook’s great UX? Constantly changing and updating their app in function of customer feedback and data — a valuable lesson for any business.

6. Snapseed

Most people use their phones to take pictures nowadays, which makes photo editing apps like Snapseed very popular. While Instagram may offer similar editing options, Snapseed’s features are much more comprehensive. The fact that there are so many ways of editing pictures (we’re talking more than just filters) with a few swipes and presses makes for a very appealing app.

A great example of UX design that’s very much focused on the community it serves — solving their problems and providing features they can’t get as easily anywhere else.

7. Cortana

Intelligent design doesn’t stop at words and images anymore.

With intelligent personal assistants like Cortana, Alexa, and Siri battling it out, the mobile experience is becoming increasingly led by voice.

All people need to do now is make a verbal request and it will be fulfilled. For example, they might say that they’re looking for a certain product and a personal assistant would quickly provide a link to that product in stock at a local store (another great example of how conversational commerce is changing ecommerce). You need to think in terms of questions, and answers, not just queries and landing pages.

In order to keep up with the dizzying pace of change, ecommerce brands, app developers, and businesses need to make sure that their products and services are being picked up by voice and local search — SEO is changing, and mobile is becoming its new battleground.

8. Amazon

With a database containing just about everything, customers can easily browse through a wide selection of products at any time, while also being treated to a regular supply of personalized recommendations. Not only does Amazon make it very easy for people to place orders, but customers can also check prices online against things in-store while they’re out and about, helping them to always get the cheapest offer.

Amazon’s ecommerce UX secret? Its focus on easy and transparent pricing. They make spotting a good deal easy, and by saving a ton of customer data, they keep people engaged with their online product catalogue.

9. PEAR

PEAR is a fitness app. What makes its UX so great is the fact that it provides real-time health data for the user. When exercising, you want the information then and there, you don’t want it all collected afterwards – especially if you have health issues.  As well as immediacy, PEAR provides motivation, free content, and a sense of a brand community to boot.

PEAR is a great addition to the smart fitness tracker market — the culmination of audience research and hard work has resulted in an app that offers a unique, immersive experience.

10. DuoLingo

If somebody’s interested in learning a new language, Duolingo was designed to help them do just that. It uses an image-based method of teaching that makes it easier for users to get a grasp of the language. It reminds them when they’re due to do their next “lesson” and it can also give in-app rewards for using it regularly. It’s really good for motivating people and the UX is a clear example of gamification can help improve customer retention rates.

Think about how you could reward your customers or users. Also, people clearly like to challenge themselves, so what about introducing levels or different access areas?

More and more, phones are becoming all-encompassing devices that can do pretty much anything — from online shopping to fitness tracking: your phone is your compass. Businesses who are smart enough to best accommodate their users are the ones who will succeed: that’s an important thing to keep in mind as we head into the mobile-first age of the web…

Written By

Patrick Foster: Been working in ecommerce since the mid 2000s, both as an entrepreneur, and now as a consultant and trainer. Lots of experience in the field with plenty of tips and tricks to share with other passionate businesses in the digital field!

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