The store navigation and user bar trends change each year, but is it for the better? Much like many open-office plans that have become trendy in the last five years, not all trends work for productivity. You may not see it at first, but key performance indicators will suffer if user experience is not up to par. Customers like a well-designed, good-looking site, but are slow to adapt to interface changes. Have you ever opened an app that has been updated and got temporarily overwhelmed by new design? If that happens on an eCommerce store, customers are less likely to spend the time to figure out their confusion.

The Magento Basics

Your store catalog is a customizable hierarchy that allows your site to support multiple navigation levels, sort by attributes and tags, and insert custom SEO.

On Magento 2, these features also include:

• Hidden categories and layered navigation for internal use or for direct link use.
• Products can be filtered by customizable parameters.
• Catalog browsing options to show recently viewed products, custom search term autocomplete and redirects, and product comparisons.
• Supports native cross-sell, up-sell and related products functions. • Supports breadcrumbs.

Best Practices

Magento is a powerful system, but that power is a double-edged sword. By planning out features ahead of time, developers can make sure they will be implemented in a way that works with Magento, rather than against it.

When building a Magento store template from scratch, or customizing your existing template, work top-down. First, it’s important think featuring your most important and revenue-driving categories as top-level navigation, and work down through the child categories. Testing is critical to making sure you optimize your site for how your customers search. It’s part data, part humanization and part guessing game when launching a re-designed site.

Test everything, and test across browser and devices. This may seem like a no-brainer, but the open-source customization of Magento means a powerful tool for customization and branding, but more moving parts.  Check your front-end look during other environments as well, such as sales, promotions, price ranges or tiered prices.

Thinking about redesigning your Magento site to increase conversion? See how we did it for our clients.