The eCommerce store owners are craving PWAs, especially after hearing the success stories of Starbucks, CommonFloor, Housing.com, and many others.
Starbucks, for example, doubled the amount of daily active users after adopting PWA technology.
CommonFloor also witnessed a 2x increase in its daily active users & a 10% increase in overall traffic.
Housing.com, a leading online real estate company, reported a whopping 40% decrease in their bounce rate after developing a PWA.
And not only big brands but online marketplace stores like Jumia also reported 12x more users and a 33% increase in conversion rate after launching PWA.
Today, the PWA technology has outcompeted native app development and demonstrated how effective it is for different kinds of businesses, including eCommerce.
So, if you’re thinking about converting your existing website or eCommerce store into PWA, you absolutely should!
However, when it comes to designing a PWA, there are certain fundamental principles one needs to keep in mind for creating impeccable UI and UX.
In this post, we’ve shared 7 fundamental principles of PWA UI/UX that you need to consider when designing PWA for your website or eCommerce store.
But first things first, let’s understand what a progressive web application is, and why does your business needs a PWA.
What is PWA & Why Your Business Needs a PWA?
A PWA is basically a type of application that is built using web technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript and is intended to work on any platform including desktops as well as mobile devices using a standard web browser.
In simple words, a PWA is a hybrid of a website and a native mobile application, making it look good on any type of device.
Today, PWAs are considered to be a great substitute for native mobile apps, thanks to the reduced costs & time required for PWA development.
In other words, Progressive Web Apps are a low-cost, cross-platform alternative to native mobile apps.
Below are the core benefits of developing a Progressive Web App for your business:
- Cost-Effective
- Smooth Performance
- Offline Mode
- Better Search Ranking
- Higher Conversion Rate
- Enhanced Security
- Improved Engagement
These remarkable benefits have not only made PWA massively popular but also made PWA a highly preferred & powerful alternative for offering your mobile customers an intuitive native app experience.
Fundamental Principles to Remember When Designing UI/UX for PWA
Now that you have a better understanding of what a PWA is & why your business needs it, let’s take a look at the fundamental principles you need to abide by when designing the UI & UX for your PWA.
1 – Responsive
A PWA must adjust its display as well as functionality according to the device type, screen size, and browser in order to provide a consistent user experience at all times to every mobile customer.
For instance, a smartphone screen is roughly between 3-7 inches while desktops have 20-30 inches of screen. In addition, smartphones also have much less processing power compared to desktops.
So, it’s better to restrict yourself from creating complex design layouts to impress customers and instead, focus on serving the customers in the best way possible.
2 – Progressive
A PWA must be capable of performing each functionality seamlessly with all kinds of web browsers seamlessly on every device.
In fact, the term “Progressive” in the Progressive Web App is itself explains its importance.
So when designing your PWA, it is crucial to gain a complete understanding of each web browser’s capability to be compatible with the PWA.
Common and popular browsers like Firefox & Chrome support mostly all PWA features, while Safari does not support a couple of PWA features.
Here’s a complete checklist of compatibility of all PWA features with various web browsers.
Keep in mind the above limitations of different web browsers when designing your PWA.
3 – Discoverable
A PWA should be able to utilize an application manifest structured in a particular format to allow search engines to index information about your Progressive Web App easily.
In simple words, remember to retain critical features of a standard website while designing your PWA to make it SEO-friendly and discoverable.
Here are a couple of things to keep in mind when designing your PWA:
- Design each page in a way that Google can discover & crawl it via an independent specific URL.
- Make sure the initial search engine index wave only fetches server-side rendered content.
- Use canonical tags for canonical URLs of every page.
- Ensure a fast loading speed, preferably within 3 seconds to secure top rankings in SERPs.
- Serve the same content to search bots & users if you’re using dynamic serving.
- Make sure your PWA is secure and is running on HTTPS.
4 – Accessible
This is because a PWA needs to deliver the best of both worlds, a user interface/user experience resembling an app & quick accessibility like browsers.
Therefore, your PWA must be accessible via a URL. In fact, it’s one of the mandatory principles of PWA, being able to install/access by a URL without having to download it off an app store.
Besides this, a launch icon for your PWA must also be available on the home screen for your mobile device customers similar to native mobile apps.
6 – Network-Independent
A well-designed PWA should be able to work in offline states or when the network connection is unavailable.
In other words, your PWA should function seamlessly regardless of interruptions in network connectivity.
When Trivago implemented PWA into their platform, they reported 67% of users whose network connectivity was interrupted, continued to browse the platform after coming back online.
There are lots of tricks you can consider implementing to keep users engaged in times of lost network connectivity.
For example, you can leverage skeleton screens to give your users a sneak peek of what to expect and guide them through a point of interest and keep them engaged until the network connectivity is reestablished.
Another trick is to use Service Workers for storing and caching user data to make your PWA browsable for an extended period of time.
Konga, for example, implemented this trick to enable access to its eCommerce store for visitors even when they didn’t have network connectivity.
7 – Secure
Lastly, your PWA must protect customers’ data across networks at all times and should safeguard information from all third parties.
This is completely non-negotiable because if you can’t guarantee to shield their personal information including name, email id, address, and payment data, no potential customer is going to buy from you.
So, achieve and maintain the highest security possible that is impossible to penetrate to give your prospective customers peace of mind when browsing and buying products from your store.
Concluding Thoughts…
As you just witnessed, designing a solid PWA UI/UX isn’t a cakewalk & requires talent as well as expertise. So, if you haven’t done it before, it’s probably best to leave it to professionals to do the job.
With that, we hope you found this post helpful. And if you wish to build a PWA for your Magento 2 store, we’ll be more than happy to assist you with our prominent Magento PWA Development Service.
