Designers can unwittingly sabotage their clients’ websites by focusing on the business owner’s personal preferences instead of considering the needs and motivations of potential customers.
A successful website is actually pretty simple: Give the People What They Want.
Or maybe, better to say, give the people what they need, when they need it. This concept is known in the user experience world as progressive disclosure.
When you boil it down, the minimum you need to do is ensure your site quickly answers two very important questions visitors are going to be asking themselves:
Does this business provide the product or service I require? Why should I select this business to fulfill the need I have?
Of course, there will be other minor but crucial determinations beyond that in order to lead to a sale, but those are the two most important for initiating customer engagement. It’s not rocket science; let people know you can provide what they need, and give them a good reason to allow your business to be the one to do it.
So if it’s all so easy, why do many sites fail to covert traffic into customers? The answer is because many designers use a flawed planning process. While many business owners are smart people and experts in their profession, things can still go horribly wrong with their website project if the designer can’t keep non-valuable input and influence to a minimum.
You, The Client, Are NOT the Target Audience
Almost universally, website projects begin with a strategy phase. During this discovery stage, the designer quizzes a business owner in order to help understand the business and its products or services. In most cases the designer is looking for the owner to describe wanted features, color preferences or desired visitor outcomes. The designer then sets off to create a website based on that feedback.
Okay, sounds good, right? Wrong.
Why is this bad? Because it now means is that the designer is building this website for the business owner. Ask any business owner how many times they’ve used their own website to make a purchase or fill out a form? A bit of initial testing aside, it’s likely ZERO. By focusing the business owner’s priorities at the expense of the customer’s needs, a website is likely going to miss key elements or considerations that might affect a visitor’s decision making process.
Large companies do expensive market research – focus groups, “persona” creation, user interviews, etc. – as part of the process to ensure their products and services will appeal to their target demographic. Unfortunately, the expenditure involved probably isn’t realistic for smaller businesses, but those businesses can still gain all kinds of ultra-valuable information from past customers and visitors.
Post-sale information gathering can be very valuable. Reach out to some recent customers to not only ensure they’re satisfied, but to also glean a few KPIs:
- What lead you to want or need the product/service our business provides?
- Did you research other companies for the same product/service?
- What made you decide to purchase from us instead of the competition?
- Did anything stand out in a positive way about your experience?
- Is there anything that could have been better about your experience?
Not only is this good customer service, it will provide great insight into the decision making that future potential customers will face, and help identify key aspects that go into making the decision to go from visitor to customer.
A second important way existing businesses can learn about their customer’s behavior is through tracking analytics tool like Google Analytics. By monitoring visitors actions while on your site, a business can determine:
- Whether or not the site is effectively converting visitors into customers.
- Where visitors are geographically located.
- If advertising or marketing campaigns are successful via unique URLs.
- Underlying site errors that may be sabotaging the visitor experience.
Positive or negative, it’s all worthwhile feedback. Not only will it go a long ways to understanding the motivations and mindset of visitors, it will help you build the best website for them, and NOT the website owner.