As I mentioned in my last post, the design of your Website is vital. Whether the site’s intent is to sell or simply showcase your company’s services, visitors need to be able to navigate the site and find information they seek with ease.
While it may be good to view established e-commerce sites and leaders in your space for ideas on how your site should flow, there are some essentials that need to be included as well. The federal government offers extensive usability guidelines that are great guidelines to follow, but is a rather lengthy and detailed read so I’ll address some of the high-level guidelines I follow when tweaking or critiquing existing sites.
Kirk Doggett
Understand customers’ goals
The best websites understand they serve the needs of their customers first.
In contrast, many websites try to push the information that *they* want to promote without regard for information that their customers might need. For example, some sites require that you log-in or create an account before anything else. While this makes sense for banking sites, for most sites this practice prioritizes business goals ahead of customer goals, which can be very frustrating for your web site visitors (your “customers”). The key is to strike a balance between your business goals and your customers’ goals.
Site Testing
Site testing is one easy way to learn about your customers. Large companies may pay for professional site testing and evaluation, but this can be prohibitively expensive for smaller sites. All you need to do is start simple, by asking friends and family to show you how they use your site. Take notes and capture their goals. Note what they like and where they get stuck. For example if users say “I’m looking for the pricing before I continue…” or “I want to find out more about company history before I call…” then you know you need to make it easy to find pricing and “about us” content that includes company background.
First-time site visitors may need to learn about your company to build trust before they are willing to take the next step, (buy a product, fill out a form, call the phone number, etc.). So it’s important to address any needs that if unmet, cause customers to drop off your site.
The objective is to anticipate your user’s goals, and then make sure your site makes it easy for them to meet these goals by surfacing the information they need. Satisfied customers will stay on your site longer, and will be more likely to meet* your* goals by continuing to visit, calling, or buying.
Keep the customer in mind
It’s important to remember that your website is a living entity that will continue to grow and change with your business. In addition to observing people using your site to learn what they want, you may also solicit feedback from your customers in an email following checkout or with a feedback from on your site. Since customers use your site to get information or purchase goods, they can give you a great insight into what your site is lacking or doing well. Periodically updating your site with improvements based on your customer’s feedback will keep the site growing and changing, and will build loyalty with your customers.
Customer feedback helps feed a virtuous cycle: site improvements will help first-time visitors be more satisfied, so they are more likely to return again, and provide feedback you can use to make further improvements which will help the next batch of first-time visitors, etc. Understanding your customer’s goals is one of the key factors you can use to improve your website designs.
From time to time, members from the VistaPrint staff will contribute articles to the VistaPrint Small Business Blog. Today we have a post from Kirk Doggett, the User Experience Principal at VistaPrint.
