With more than 4000 modules available on PrestaShop Addons marketplace, the diversity of features developed by modules developers or by the PrestaShop team is growing faster every day, making PrestaShop one of the most adaptive and versatile e-commerce solution.
UX Challenge
Starting from this statement, one of the challenges PrestaShop has to address is consistency: with the variety of developers and modules comes the need to harmonise the interfaces in order to give our merchants the most fluid and consistent PrestaShop experience.
There are two things to take into account when it comes to harmonising interfaces: you may be familiar with the notion of UI (User interface) and UX (User experience). As a reminder, UI is the visual part of the interface: colors, buttons’ shapes, typography, spacing… On another hand, UX defines how the interface is meant to be used: architecture, navigation, wordings, interactions and many other aspects that reflect the ergonomy, usability and efficiency of the interface.
The UX guide
The goal of this document is to start establishing a certain pattern in the way merchants use their modules, so they don’t have to learn anew every time they get a new one. If merchants can get familiar with this pattern, it will result in a better clarity of the overall diversity of modules interfaces. The designer team and I wrote this document based on a representative sample of different modules from the marketplace, and a list of UX best practices that were the most relevant regarding our problematic.
This document is a first step in our ambition to provide more resources and help our community to develop easier and better.
We wish you a good reading, don’t hesitate to give us your feedback ;)
More
If you are interested to know more about UX and UI best practices, below are other interesting resources on the topic: