The User Experience Drives the Success of Your Business
User experiences are just as important to B2B customers as they are in retail marketing. The reasons for this evolving trend can be attributed to the growing use of mobile phones to access the Internet and increased online ordering by people of every age and demographic group.
B2B decision-makers use their phones to buy retail products like other groups, so they've come to expect the same high-quality user features on business websites that they find in their business-to-consumer (B2C) shopping experiences. User experience or UX can be defined as everything that websites try to accomplish to encourage greater interactions between customers and business brands at various touch points along their browsing and buying journeys.
B2B Companies can customize each user journey with special website designs, varying levels of functionality, interactive characteristics, architectural details for navigating through websites, high-resolution images, videos, apps, and other features.
Together, these personalized and targeted efforts comprise the user interface, or UI. The best practices for designing UIs and UXs depend on a company's products, demographic profiles of its customers, and other people who actually use the site such as third-party vendors, resellers, distributors, purchasing managers, consumers, bloggers, social media members, etc.
Each website user might be a customer, company decision-maker, investor, employee, purchasing manager, or even a company executive who's screening companies for a potential business partnership. It's critical to create different customer segments to provide the features that educated guesses predict that visitor wants but with easy ways to correct any mistaken impressions quickly.
The Business-to-Business Difference
B2B websites must satisfy greater demands than consumer-targeting websites for many reasons. Buyers use websites to connect with third parties like shippers, vendors, and distributors to research products, check availability, and schedule deliveries of bulk orders.
B2B customers also want access to details of their accounts, abilities to customize orders, access to valuable support materials and technical specifications, and third-party contacts that help them choose and market the products that they buy. Buyers are also retail customers, so they can't help but be influenced by easy-to-use design features like those that they enjoy when shopping for personal goods and services.
What this means for B2B websites is that their UI and UX designs must be highly functional and as well-designed and personalized as those of B2C sites, sending users down a clearly defined path. That could mean providing a very different interface and experience for a children's clothing manufacturer than for a supplier of fitness equipment that interfaces with hospitals, clinics, or physicians for biometric monitoring.
Delivering a personalized and satisfying user experience to each customer is the major benefit of customizing a B2B eCommerce platform. Intuitive websites answer customers' questions before they even formulate them. Everything that each visitor sees and does on the site should reinforce the user experience with the right language, ideas, graphics, navigation architecture, automation features, and responsive screen displays for ease of use.
Statistical Support for B2B UX Design Strategies
One of the key marketing trends that affect B2B companies is that designs are becoming more personalized and adapted to individual users.
That means customers see different screens when they log in to websites or applications, and company stakeholders get very different sets of features and custom dashboards to manage administrative functions and collaborations. This highly personalized approach is essential because statistics suggest that 89 percent of businesses will compete primarily on providing better customer experiences over the next few years.
User Research, User Testing
The UI/UX is the engine that provides custom user experiences for each customer, and—after careful user UX research—B2B companies can design radically different interfaces for segmented customers, stakeholders, third-party contacts, distributors, and other business stakeholders. The interface is one area where developers can exercise their creativity and design skills to provide an experience that mirrors what B2C customers enjoy on user-friendly retail sites.
However, best practices for B2B developers designing interfaces involve using heuristic information and UX research on their habits that they gain through segmentation, buyer behavior, website analytics, trial-and-error, demographics, and interface testing on multiple device models.
Usability Customizations Based on Heuristics
Empowering comprehensive user research and getting approvals from multiple decision-makers and buying committees are the most important factors in designing user interfaces for B2B websites according to a comprehensive analysis that included website testing, focus groups, and field studies. Key findings also supported customizing interfaces based on the following heuristic information:
User interfaces aren't static but dynamic tools that need to change based on evolving customer profiles, marketing trends, new product lines, technology advances, changes to the SEO best practices and ranking algorithms of search engines, and other criteria. B2B companies should strive to create dynamic, evolving eCommerce platforms that continually adapt, so it's perfectly acceptable to innovate in small ways, use trial-and-error methods, and adapt.
Best Practices for Delivering Superior User Experiences
Delivering more options to user interfaces depends on back-end development, website design features, site functionality, connections with third parties, product catalogs, and internal searchability features. User experiences, often abbreviated as UX, describe everything that's available for users on websites. Enhanced searchability is a big feature of user-friendly websites.
If a B2B company sells to plumbers, electricians, contractors, and other practical engineers, then product catalogs could be overwhelming. Designing a great user experience takes these customer problems into account and provides solutions such as product-locator wizards, custom searches by manufacturer, product type, product function, materials, specifications, and other searchable characteristics.
Robust B2B eCommerce platforms solve problems for buyers by focusing on different customer profiles and providing each demographic group of customers with the tools they need to locate products, pay for them, research substitutes, consult outside industry experts, set buying limits in their organizations and accelerate committee or multiple decision-maker approvals of orders.
Back-end customizations should maintain current inventories across multiple channels, provide versatile shipping options, show photos for product searches in real time, and display snippets of information to accelerate complex searches.
Front & Back-End UX Developments for B2B eCommerce
Back-end customizations can offer users lots of functional options such as managing the advanced-approval ordering process, researching products in-depth directly from contacts with vendors or manufacturers, getting exact price quotes for special orders, performing multifaceted searches, exploring shipping options, and applying for flexible billing, paying and credit options.
However, the most important back-office use feature for most B2B companies is optimizing product searches. Designing a robust SKU table that includes alternate names, part numbers, manufacturer information, and recommended substitutions for discontinued products can provide daily benefits to harried customers and a B2B platform where expanded search functionality generates increased sales.
User interfaces drive the process of showing the right features to customers and delivering the same convenience that B2C websites offer. If the customers have been segmented correctly, they'll see what's most important to them when they log in on a mobile phone.
The process is an ongoing effort that needs to adjust based on new buying behaviors, seasonal buying habits, availability of new products, and other sources of information about customers that become available through strong back-office analytics.
Navigation and Self-Identification Features
The best features are useless unless people can find them and shorter digitally- and technologically-generated attention spans mean that people won't look for very long. For example, you might label product display pages for customers with boxes or buttons that read “Engineers,” “Custom Builds,” and “Manufacturers” to help people find the products they need faster. Numerous studies show that bounce rates can range from milliseconds to several seconds before digital wanderlust influences customers to go elsewhere.
Hit the highlights with a lean, clean design and logical navigation instead of adding lots of confusing features, links, and content. Most people are searching on their phones with small screens, and customers probably can't view much without scrolling. Appropriate graphics and illustrations are fine, but make sure that they tell the story of what's available when customers click on the link.
UI/UX Tips from B2B eCommerce Experts
Creating great end-user experiences and custom user interfaces begins by establishing trust with your customers, staff, support teams, and multiple stakeholders to build collaborative and long-term business relationships to address every user's pain points.
At Clarity Ventures, our UX designers have the technical skills to build custom features and interfaces that deliver focused and expansive user options, but more importantly, we work with your IT teams and stakeholders in the development process.
Contact us today to see how we can work with your IT staff and stakeholders to develop multifaceted search options, differentiated catalogs, custom pricing options, better customer-segmentation strategies, and other features that define a user-friendly, dynamic platform for B2B eCommerce.