Your users are starting to notice | a guide to listening

 – posted June 26th, 2009 by Conor O'Sullivan     Comments (4)

Your users are starting to notice that your site, well, it just doesn’t feel right. They can’t exactly put their finger on it:

Is it the search?
Maybe they misspell what they’re looking for and your site doesn’t offer alternatives. Maybe it doesn’t even offer results.

Is it the checkout?
Maybe there are no related products to view or other customer voices to be heard. Maybe your store has strange and unrecognizable products names.

Is it the lack of community? The lack of continuity? The lack of professionalism?

Say you’re a high street store

Your users may start to notice a major difference between your store and your website. They wonder when the offline gloss disappeared. They wonder why they are funneled through your site with qualifier pages and barriers.

Say you’re a bank

Yesterday one of your users watched a clock ticking away their lunchtime in one of your branches and wondered why they couldn’t do this from their desk.

Say you’re a mobile website

Your users are starting to curse you when they try to input search criteria with their big finger into a tiny and misplaced form field. All they want to do is find an address while they are on the move.

Your users are starting to notice and they’re voting with their feet (and hands).

The consequences

Search engines can teleport users anywhere online. They can turn your customers into someone else’s customers quicker than you can say “brand loyalty.” Successful companies have done their homework: they’ve employed analytics methodologies and separated their keywords from their buzzwords. So when your customer decides to go elsewhere, the successful company’s site is only a click away.

These days the bar has been significantly raised. Anyone operating beneath it won’t get much more mileage out of their internet presence.

However tolerant your current users still are there is a whole generation of intolerance on the way. If my son is anything to go by, there is an army of 8 year olds soon to be brandishing credit cards at your front door. If you’re not up to scratch they will take their limited attention span and potential spending power elsewhere. These users are banner blind, brand disloyal and would trade their Nintendos for the next shiniest thing available. And why? In my sons words: “Because it’s class and it does better stuff.”

Playing the blame game

You can blame your back-end and your infrastructure and your development team and more. You can fire and hire product managers, build and demolish sales teams, spend money to fight fires, light fires to raise money. But really, it’s all very simple. All your company has to do is listen to your customers.

I have worked with many organisations that trumpeted usability to customers during sales pitches and skimmed them over during team meetings. I’ve heard developers argue that usability is an entirely subjective field. But those are the companies that aren’t up to speed.

Make your website better, make more money

success

Support your users goals:

  • Create meaningful and rewarding experiences
  • Make your interfaces intuitive
  • Entice your users with compelling functionality
  • Empower your users with relevant features (not creeping featurism)

Educate them with content, make their lives easier through usability. Anything that you don’t do, someone else (your competitor) is doing.

It takes a lot of work: user, stakeholder, and customer service interviews; analytics; personas; user journey maps; accessibility; content development; information architecture; iterations; tests; etc. But it will pay.

The return on investment in our current climate is staying in business and building lasting relationships with your customers. That relationship starts with listening.

Categories Usability

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