Monday, February 2, 2015

What Makes Ecommerce Design Different?

It’s no surprise or secret that ecommerce has gained popularity and expanded in the last ten years or so. Companies like Amazon and Alibaba are now global monoliths and it seems that there’s a new eBay-like site popping up every other day.


Sadly remarkably few of these sites take the time to consider the very different UX needs that ecommerce sites present though.


So, if you’re in the process of developing an ecommerce site for a client or company, read on and discover some of the considerations you may need to take to make its UX seamless and awesome.


The Product


Let’s start with what must be the most important aspect of any ecommerce site: the products. They’re the site’s selling points (literally), so making sure that their part in the user experience is spot on will be key.


Making your product images bigger is one trend that has been gaining traction, and for good reason. People shop with their eyes, and the web is no different; big, detailed images allow customers to peruse your wares before committing to them, which means you deepen the level of trust between your site and user.


Interestingly, though, this only seems to be the case when looking at products for which the physical condition or appearance can influence the buying decision.


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The eye-tracking study done by the Nielsen Norman Group above shows how users react differently to images on two different sites. When viewing book shelves on the site on the left, users’ attention is focused largely on the images, whereas those considering a new flat screen TV were less concerned with what it looks like and focused more on the technical specs of the product.


Here, it’s a good idea to make sure that the technical specifications are front and centre, and easy to scan, giving the user an easy way to differentiate and make their choice.


The Reviews


Review are another key factor of your product pages, and I think it goes without saying that this is an important part of any ecommerce UX.


As people we tend to distrust faceless corporations, especially when we’re interacting with them in a non-physical manner like the web, because it makes us feel less in control. The opinions of others like ourselves, though, helps give us confidence in our purchase decision.


So, user reviews give us that extra sense of security when it comes to buying something. The effect is even more pronounced if the site has high traffic and a “X number of people found this review helpful” type ranking system, such as Amazon. Remember, the key in every ecommerce system is to build trust with the user.


user reviews

The Cart


Another one of the most vital aspects of any ecommerce experience, the shopping cart is often neglected or thought about in the wrong way when it comes to UX.


The act of adding something to my cart, a very important action, is often seamlessly integrated into the experience (a process increasingly referred to as ‘slippy’ UX).


This sounds like a good thing, until you think about the fact that I’m potentially spending a large amount of my hard-earned money on a product, and have no idea whether it’s actually gone into my shopping cart or not.


At best, I have to search the screen for the often obscure cart icon (another thing that makes little sense) to check whether the product has actually been added or not. At worst, I’ll assume it wasn’t added and end up clicking ‘Add to Cart’ again, meaning I’ve now accidentally bought two of the same product.


Takealot.com, a leading ecommerce site in South Africa, has this exact issue. Adding a product to my cart gives no feedback, and I’m left having to search for the obscure cart icon somewhere in the top right of the page to make sure I’ve done something.


One thing Takealot does get right, though, is the cart itself. Research has found that many users use their cart less like a physical shopping cart and more like a ‘wish list’, using it to help make decisions before actual checkout.


Takealot shopping cart

Takealot’s cart helps with this process by giving the user a rundown of their products with applicable images (again, important for some products). It also gives you an easy way to remove items from your cart (handy, given their opaque add-to-cart process) and, perhaps most important of all, doesn’t require the user to login until actual checkout.


Perhaps most impressively, the Takealot cart even warns you of any necessary dependencies a product might have -- for instance, a Blu-Ray disc requiring a Blu-Ray player.


In that last case, one might even improve the UX by placing a link to Blu-Ray players available on the site, giving the opportunity for the user to add one to their cart immediately.


Continue reading %What Makes Ecommerce Design Different?%




by Byron Houwens via SitePoint

Introducing JScrambler: Protect Your Code

Effective PDF Generation in Drupal

A few months ago I had a client requirement for PDF generation, in this case to generate certificates that could be viewed online or printed. I spent some time looking into the best Drupal options available and picked up some advice along the way on how best to accomplish these aims. After mentioning my results to several people, it seemed that PDF generation was a common requirement and now I have the same need again on a personal project, so it seemed a good case study to walk you through what I found.


Why not just print?


If your requirements are simple, it may be easier to just to tell your website users to print and there’s nothing stopping them doing this. If we want a level of control over what is printed or we want to distribute files for printing, then we need to look into other options.


Web vs Print


PDF generation takes a slight change of mindset. As web developers, we have spent a lot of time convincing designers from a print background to stop producing pixel perfect designs that will be difficult to reproduce on the web. If you want to introduce PDF generation or any form of high designed print output, then we need to relearn some of our old skills we left behind. The nature of print means that it is precise and often needs pixel (or millimeter) perfect design.


What am I trying to accomplish?


I am currently working on a board game and I want to allow players to be able to create their own cards that can be shared on the website and printed for use in the game. We have a specific size and layout that these cards will always be and need to conform to, here’s the initial design that we will partially recreate:



PDF options in Drupal


There are two options in Drupal for creating PDFs. The Print module and Views PDF. Views PDF initially seemed the better option as it would allow us to leverage the power of views and the myriad options it offers. However, it has the PHP module as a dependency and as far as I know, is reliant on the eval() function. PDF generation has the potential to be a server intensive task and this method seemed inefficient to me, aside from my reluctance to ever have any kind of PHP evaluation module enabled in Drupal.


This caused me to settle on the print module, which is also better supported and offers many other options for output that may prove useful.


Next we need to decide on our PDF generation library, I am going to suggest you use wkhtmltopdf and explain why later, as I want to build something to compare first. Do this by visiting the wkhtmltopdf website and follow the instructions for your setup. Remember it will need to be installed on local and production sites. After installing you need to create an alias to the wkhtmltopdf executable into your Drupal libraries folder, i.e.:



ln -s /usr/bin/wkhtmltopdf /var/www/sites/all/libraries/wkhtmltopdf


Continue reading %Effective PDF Generation in Drupal%




by Chris Ward via SitePoint

Create a Ringtone Randomizer on Android

New Methods in Ruby 2.2

vector illustration of dark red shield with ruby programming lan


Most of the fanfare around Ruby 2.2 has focused on garbage collection (GC) upgrades. The GC will now clean up symbols and has a new incremental algorithm that reduces the pause time. These changes are very exciting, but there were some new methods added as well. Let's see what other new toys 2.2 delivered.


Continue reading %New Methods in Ruby 2.2%




by Aaron Lasseigne via SitePoint

The Beginners Guide to WooCommerce Taxes

Why You Should Use Git

Ever since version control systems such as Git have become widely-known and well-used, modern development processes have radically changed.


Here are some reasons why Git has the power to improve your development workflow.



Git Encourages Modularization


In even the smallest development projects, developers are often required to work on multiple components in parallel. Feature X, bug #102, a new UI for a sign-up form, etc.


Among many others, here are a couple of major issues with projects that aren’t version-controlled:



  • Project dependencies will be painful to manage. Team members must sort out which changes affect which components.

  • Unfinished and experimental code will mix-in with production-ready code. Without version control, there is a huge chance that an unstable piece of code gets deployed to a production environment.


Imagine these scenarios.


Your client tells you that they don’t want feature X anymore.


Or what if you find that feature Y — an experimental feature you have been working on — can’t be implemented?


How do you get code removed safely from your code base?


Using branches is the solution to these commonplace development problems. Although Git wasn’t the version control system (VCS) that introduced the concept of branching, it’s the first of its kind that makes it user-friendly.


Git Encourages Creativity and Experimentation


Git branching will improve your code-quality and productivity. It facilitates creativity and experimentation by removing your fear that the current version of the project will be affected while you are trying out ideas, giving you an environment where you can confidently explore and develop your project’s future features.


With Git, you can even create multiple branches that approach a given problem in different ways, test each of them with your master branch (the most current version of your project), and then choose the best option.


Git Allows You to Undo Your Mistakes


In Git, you can undo almost everything.


Being able to undo things gives your team the courage to try out ideas and concepts without the risk of breaking stuff, which in turn fosters a culture of innovation.


Git Makes Your Progress Clear


A commit in Git refers to the act of recording changes you have made in your source code.


When used properly, Git makes it easy to craft very granular commits. You can see what changes have occurred down to the microscopic level: Git will tell you what characters and lines in your source code have been altered. If you want to compare two versions of a file or the difference between two of your commits, you can issue Git’s diff command, which will highlight the differences between them.


A side note when using commits: As a good version control policy, I recommend that each commit should only contain changes that belong to a single topic.


For instance, if you’re fixing a specific bug — let’s call it bug #200 — that requires multiple source code changes across several files, all those changes should be under one commit in order for you to easily track changes to your project related to that bug. This way, you can document that "commit X fixed bug #200". A side benefit of this commit policy is, when you encounter another bug similar to bug #200 somewhere else in your project months from now, you can review how you resolved the first bug.


Mixing different topics in one commit makes it hard to see what things were added or resolved.


Also, multi-topic commits makes it more difficult to roll back to a previous version if you ever find the need to do so. Imagine a commit that contains changes for both feature A and feature B. If you find out later on that you introduced a severe security leak with feature B, you’ll have to roll back the code for both topics just to get rid of the problem.


You Can Work Offline


A lot of companies underestimate the benefits that can be had if their developers were to be able to work offline.


Being able to code on your laptop without having to connect to your company’s servers is not only about being able to work during a commute or while at home (which a lot of companies don’t permit due to security restrictions).


More importantly, being able to work offline makes you more fail-safe as a team: While with a VCS like Subversion or CVS, a developer can’t continue their work when a central server goes down, this is not an issue with Git.


In Git, developers can perform everything on their personal computer, making them independent of possible infrastructure downtimes.


Never Lose Data Ever Again


Losing data and not being able to recover it can break a dev project.


We’ve all heard or experienced our own set of horror stories about failed backups and servers. It’s good to know that when using Git, every developer working on a project has a full-fledged copy on their machine, including the project’s complete change history.


And if your team uses a remote source code repository such as GitHub, then the chances of losing your work in the event that your on-site backups fail is much smaller.


If your backups break down, losing data isn’t even a possibility when using Git: Just take any team member’s local repository and restore in minutes.


How to Use Git Today


Git has stepped out of being a technology for early-adopters. Today, more and more developers are using it to improve the quality of their code and workflow.


If you would like to get started with Git right now, read these resources:



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About the Author


Tobias Günther is CEO and founder of fournova. In 2010, he set out to make Git easier to use: Together with his team, he develops the Git desktop client, Tower for Mac.


The post Why You Should Use Git appeared first on Six Revisions.





by Jacob Gube via Six Revisions
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