Paper to Pixel

I guess we all remember the days when things were simple. You would work only on what you were best at in the design and what would give you the joy of working. And ignore anything else.

Nowadays the situation seems more complicated. The world and a workplace demand more and more and even the design profession hasn’t escaped that.

I recently met with a good number of my design friends and clients and most of them mentioned a slight discomfort they feel with the more demanding web work they are being asked to quote for. It’s one thing to price a simple website but it’s something completely different to imagine how much work is involved in a bigger web project like e-commerce for example.

What really struck my friends was the complexity of the work involved. It’s not just a layout and content placed on a page as one of them put it. There are way more things to consider even before you begin.

So in order to make things easier for them and many of you I decided to create a short series of tips for designing for e-commerce.

We start off today with a list of what you need to find out from your client before you even decide on the full scope of work for the project.

When you look closely at most average shops, at first glance they all seem to work the same. There is a product listing, detailed overview of a product and a checkout. And that seems to be it.

Well, in most cases it is. Although in order to know exactly what functionality you need to design for, you need to find out few things from your client:

1. Why do they want e-commerce site in the first place
As silly as this question sounds it actually makes sense. I guess in order to create a perfect shop for your client you need to know what are their reasons and most importantly their plans for the new shop.
Is it going to be selling few products only or will it grow and expand over time. This will certainly affect your designs so it’s better to know it from the start.

2. Is it going to be e-commerce alone or will other website functionality be required?
By default e-commerce systems apart from their standard functionality allow very limited, if any content management features. Therefore find out whether your client does not require a Content Management System to manage additional pages in the shop.

Your client may also want to run a blog, or set up internet forums to interact with his clients and these obviously increase your scope of work considerably.

3. Try to find out how many products do they expect to be selling

Depending on the answer you will have to design product presentation that can handle whatever number is mentioned and also allow for the shop to grow if needs be.

4. How many categories do they foresee for their products.
A major part of e-commerce interface is categories listing and in order to design it right you need to now roughly how many categories there are going to be. Will there be any subcategories as well? How does your client want to structure their categories listing? You may have a say on that last one but still it is your client who may dictate the shops structure.

A tip, always assume that the number of categories will change and design thier listing to allow for that.

5. Does your client plan any user interaction

• will they require user registration
• user reviews
• recommended products
• product of the day/week/month

These obviously have to be included in the design as well and very often interactive elements are the most problematic to design for.

It is easy for things to go wrong when you work with e-commerce project. Unfortunately one of the characteristics of the medium is that it can grow and in most cases it will. Your design has to reflect that.

When designing for e-commerce, just like with creating layouts for CMS sites you design for change and that can take a considerable amount of your time which you should factor in for.

Nonetheless if you have all the information you need then unless there is a considerable change of plans you shouldn’t have any problems with creating your layouts.