When designing your dream website and coming up with how everything should look and where things should be placed, something that can be easily forgotten is the experience that will be had by the customer.
We have all done this, created something beautiful and amazing and then later found out that it is actually difficult to use (i.e. a Dyson Vacuum Cleaner; beautiful but I can’t figure out how to take the dust bag out to be cleaned for the life of me, or the new iPhone update that you now have to double press the home button to unlock your phone when we have been trained all this time to slide to open). It is annoying, it means big changes, and it could all be avoided by asking one simple question:
“How will a random person feel about this?â€
Thinking about your customer’s experience is one of the most important things you can do when you are building a website. You want to make sure it is pretty, laid out well, and you MUST make sure it is easy for users to navigate. The experience had by the user is, at the end of the day, the most important part about your website.
No one really cares if it is beautiful when they can’t figure out how to scroll, find a menu, or do anything else on your site. There is not much worse than a website that no one can use, no matter how amazing it looks.
If you are a website that sells clothing to people, you have to make sure you have several things easily accessible, including, the shopping cart, a “purchase†button, size options, fabric and fit details, and a number of other things. This is something that you need to take into account when you are deciding where to place what and what you think will look the best.
If your customer does not like your website, it lessens their chance of ever wanting to visit your site again, as well as decreasing their chance of purchasing something from you. And those are two things that you want to push UP with your website, not DOWN!
When you look at your website from a design standpoint, it should be beautiful and convey exactly what you are all about as a company. At the same time, it should be easy to use and communicate very well to anyone who visits it.
There is a lot of importance in making a website user friendly and easy to use, and let’s not forget FAST, which is your hosting company’s responsibility. When you are designing your own website, it is so important to keep that in mind. So always remember to take a step back and put on the shoes of someone who does not know your website, and does not know your business, and see if it is still as beautiful and amazing and perfect then as it was before.
You may be surprised! And it is important that you find that out sooner rather than later!
