Intelligence
Storefront
Why 55 is the most important number in web design
28
rad! more of this stuff please
1
not useful or interesting
3 minute read
A client stakeholder – we’ll call him Ryan – recently told me, "We'll get to the icing on the cake later.” Ryan was referring to design on a multi six figure eCommerce build with more than enough resources and time to do everything properly. If you work in the industry, you know how rare that is. If you don't, ask around: in our world, there's almost never enough time or resources to do truly great work. In this case, Ryan is trying to be proactive. He's thinking about strategy, flows, and technicals of the sales funnel. He thinks in numbers and data, but doesn’t realize design is the first stake in brand credibility.
Great d2c brands don't "get to design later”, and it’s anything but icing on the cake. In fact, design is the most important place to start – it’s the batter.
Here are the facts:
- Humans process visuals 60,000 times faster than text.
- 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual.
- Most importantly: It takes your shopper 55 milliseconds to form an opinion on your brand.
Pause and consider for a moment...
Before they've read a single line of text, explored your product, or interacted with your storefront, the buyer has decided if your experience is credible. If it is, everything from that point forward reinforces a positive first impression – leading to a frictinless transaction. If it’s not, you’re at a competitive disadvantage from day one. This buyer will have a higher acquisition cost, and take more effort to convert. That’s all design.
What’s interesting is Ryan didn't blow past design because of expense or timeline – common factors. Rather, he genuinely does not believe effective design will have an impact on the sales funnel. To him, and an alarming number of brand decision makers,  design is excess. It’s fugazi, it's a wazzi, it’s a woozy…just a “nice to have.”
We're all about the data too – but increasingly clients (and the industry at large) seem to put quality design in the same bucket as their monthly blog schedule: important, but not foundational.
Has the industry forgotten that web design and development are two equally important sides of the same three-dimensional coin?
Design sits at the intersection of shopper, and strategy. Before the technicalities of flows, lead gen, heat mapping, or conditional logic have an impact, design has the ability to capture a buyer in half a second.
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Who Killed Design?
After the call, I spent some time thinking about who’s killing storefront design in eCommerce, and why. It’s not singlehandedly Ryan. I think somewhere along the way we collectively forgot that good design is the single most important factor of a high converting storefront. Argue all you want, but this is the very first thing a prospect sees. ECommerce made up just 13% of U.S. retail sales in 2022 – sometimes it’s easy to neglect that our entire industry is still very much in its infancy. Marketers love to look at a Pandora's box of customer data, strategic initiatives and self-optimizing SaaS tools for answers, but the good old visual experience is equally important.  Â
The most state-of-the-art digital marketing tools are effectively useless if the prospect's experience – what they see on load – does not entirely delight. This happens before the lead magnet triggers, or the tracking pixel reports. Seriously. It takes 55 milliseconds for a prospect to form an opinion on your website – that's 0.05 seconds. Let me be clear, design is the foundation on which you build a successful website, not the icing on the cake. Â
-Charlie
1 Baymard Institute, 2023
In the light-speed world of eCommerce, opinions are the enemy of progress. Personal biases and unsubstantiated ideas lead to opinion soup and strategic quagmire. Â We explore how real-time data is crucial, not only to understand your customer, but for crafting brand-level initiatives. Then, see how the "5 why's" technique can help eliminate opinion-based initiatives for once and for all.
