If you don’t believe that good UX designs determine whether or not your firm makes millions or billions.
Let me provide concrete examples by comparing two softwares WordPress vs. Shopify, I will detail two user stories together.
Comparing two user stories or user experiences together is how you should perform a competitive analysis.
Comparing the UX of your software product and one of your competitors can give you insight on how you fit in the market. What were looking for are points of confusion and then frustration.
Userstory of making a blog post for WordPress vs Shopify
Because I made blog posts on Shopify & WordPress, I can screenshot my experience and make a side-by-side comparison.
If your competitors make a product, you want to experience it to get an understanding of what works from the small features to the whole product experience. What are users buying? and asking users what they love about it.
Shopify and WordPress provided the same goal for users here e.i. I want to write blogs post on different subjects. However, the experience each product provides is different to reach the same goal. Let’s look at WordPress first.
WordPress User Experience:
Let’s say you have never used WordPress before, and you are a new user, this was my experience I will document it as I go. I had to create a specific page for my post and edit what’s called a query loop block to set a specific category, this took me 4 hours & and a lot of Google searches. Even then, it wasn’t done.
For now, let’s look at creating a blog post user experience.
On the Post section, I was thinking there was going to be a way for you to filter by topic or categories and be able to assign specific categories to blog posts. There is no option to do that on this page, it’s inconvenient. So, organizing and changing many blogs by categories here is not possible.
How do you do that then?
So when making your blog post you are supposed to click “Post” and then scroll down to find “categories”. it’s not self-evident enough for the users to find because the default view when editing & writing a blog post is the “block” view. Inside the “block” on the right-hand side it relates to editing text on the left-hand side.
After you click “post”, you have to scroll down to find categories.
From here its pretty self-evident you can Add New Category. You can select and deselect categories it works great!
How do you remove Categories? No idea it’s not self-evident, no icons. This is a small feature within a feature under the “Post” section. Don’t hide features users will use on a consistence basis.
So what I care about as a user is hidden under another feature that took me lot of time to find and Google search for. This is why blogging is too difficult, time consuming, confusing, frustrating, for users who use WordPress.
Shopify User Experience:
Here finding blog post is easy, posts are not separate entity compared to their page
Now a core difference in design on the Shopify blog post or ‘post’ page versus the WordPress ‘post’ page are these small search features along the top. I am able to search by author, category, and so on at the price of $1 or $29 a month versus WordPress high price.
Here I can easily filter and sort by categories. This marginal improvement over the other design on word press
Now lets create new blogpost
Here it’s clear I added content and title on the left, and it’s not mixed in with the metadata or settings on the right like with WordPress. Then you explore the page like usual zig-zag back & forth. You find blog types or what Shopify calls categories. Select your category and its only renders blogs on those specific pages you created specifically for that type. It didn’t take me forever or too google it took 20 minutes. It was not frustrating or confusing. It was self-evident.
I have a gut feeling that developers and designers at Shopify have used or experienced WordPress for a very long time, that they found its weakness or faults in its design and created a completely new experience/design for its users in the no-code website builder space. Which there is a ton of competition for this type of product; think Wix, Square Space, and WordPress.
I think they narrowed in on what was easily understandable to users outside of WordPress space, the younger generation of drop shippers, and homegrown business owners.
This is why Shopify is worth 78.48 billion USD right now and growing faster than WordPress’s value was 7.5 billion USD in 2021. Even though the economy it supports is $636 billion it doesn’t capture that value for itself. Shopify ease of use and its UX experience is better and WordPress of course has been around longer and is worth more right now at a billion.
In Google search trends Shopify was one of the few CMS that have surpassed WordPress in the last five years. Other CMS has not come to close that gap in brand awareness and word-of-mouth recommendation. Shopify in the last year has consistently super passed WordPress.
Right now since I use WordPress & Shopify, and if someone asked me if “I want to start a blog/business what should I use?” I am going to recommend Shopify.
WordPress does still make sense for small businesses instead of individuals because of the deployment and management of custom integrations. However, my discussions and interviews with others who use WordPress have to deal with different versions, security issues, old themes, and things like old out-of-date themes can be deal breakers and huge time sinks for business & their editors to manage WordPress software.
This is what I mean by a Good Design is Worth Billions. A good UX design can get your business into industries worth billions that just doesn’t imply the software industry.