The annoying UX of online shopping
Even before the pandemic, I was an avid online shopper. I considered it a hobby to window-shop online and I would regularly spend hours browsing through everything new and on sale on all my favorite stores’ websites. I wouldn’t buy anything 90% of the time, but it was just fun to look around.
Since the pandemic hit, that hobby became more of a necessity since I no longer had the option to do my shopping in person. But whereas before I was looking at fun new outfits and accessories, now I was spending time shopping online for pretty much everything a person could need: groceries, toiletries, cleaning supplies, appliances, home goods, and way more.
When you spend that much time shopping online, little things about the user experience really start to bug you. Before, I think I would shrug off UX issues as just a little bug or something that I didn’t really have to worry about. Besides, I was just scrolling around for fun. But once online shopping is the only way you are getting anything, negative aspects of the user experience become glaringly obvious. I decided to take note of my biggest online shopping annoyances and, when applicable, think of how those issues could be solved.
Here’s my take on some really irritating UX issues I’ve seen on multiple online shopping sites/platforms.
- Refreshing the page automatically after selecting a filter option. This slows the customer down when trying to find what they want, and if this is paired with a very extensive list of options, it could take a TON of clicks and time just to filter down to what they actually want to see. For big stores with tens of thousands of items, this “feature” has definitely stopped me from buying out of sheer frustration. The sites that allow for multiple filter options to be selected before updating the page are the ones I choose repeatedly.
- Limiting the user to 1 selection within a filter (i.e. for Size, only allowing them to choose 1 size option). It is pretty common knowledge that sizes are inconsistent, even sizing within the same brand. So why would an online store only allow someone to choose one selection in a filter category, especially if that category is size? It makes no sense, and will only force the customer to conduct multiple separate searches, wasting their time and potentially frustrating them to the point of quitting.
- Opening selected items in the same tab, rather than pulling them up in a new one. I don’t know about you, but I want to make sure I keep my place on the page and keep all the filters I have in place. Perhaps this is more of a personal annoyance and other people don’t want other tabs to open, but if I had to guess I would say that people don’t want their shopping experience slowed down, which loading a new page in the same page and have to go back could easily do.
- Inaccurate or excessive/repetitive options in filters
This comes back to the sizing issue. We all know there are a ton of different sizes and people can fit many different ones. This issues takes that into account by including every single size option for every single piece of clothing. Sounds like a great way to solve that whole sizing filter option, right?
Except then you’re left with potentially over a hundred different sizes. If you’re viewing all items on site, you are seeing all numeric sizes, waist sizes, shoe sizes, ring sizes, bra sizes, petites sizes, tall sizes, plus sizes, etc. And now the user has to select every single size they could potentially be, which could take several minutes. A good solution I’ve seen for this issue is to group like sizes, so selecting “Large” will include anything from a women’s size 10–14, waist size 30–32, and so on. It consolidates the sizes they would likely be including in their search and makes the filtering process simple and quick.
- Bringing me back to the top of the page after viewing an item instead of returning me to my place on that page. I’m not going to go on too much about this. If a user was on a certain part of the page before being redirected, they should be brought back to that exact same place.
- Showing items that are out of stock. Also not going into this too much, but if a site is up-to-date enough to show an item is out of stock, it should simply remove that item or make it abundantly clear that the item shown is out of stock. The only exception I can see to this is if the company offers alerts or notifications to the user if the item comes back into stock.
- “Top Rated” sorting showing items with 1 review
I completely understand that this is one of those cases where it is technically working as designed. The product shown has a full 5 stars so obviously it is the top rated product! It makes total sense. But if you think about the user’s intention behind searching for the top rated product, they are likely trying to find which product has the most people agree it is the best product. The importact factors here are both the average star rating and the number of people who have rated the product. As a user, it would be way more helpful to see “Top Rated” indicate which product has had a ton of people review it who agree it is a 5-star product, so that is what should be shown.
I’m sure there are plenty more UX issues with online shopping as more and more stores turn to online stores in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and related store closings. What are some issues you’ve noticed on your favorite shop sites?
