My name is Alison and I’m a usability and user experience specialist.
‘Usability’ is the slightly ugly term for checking that your website helps users to do what they want to do with the minimum of fuss and frustration.
Good usability is practically invisible: you feel it in websites that have simple, intuitive processes. For example, checkout processes that give you a personalised, brand-consistent thank-you, and then place you right back where you were shopping.
‘User experience’ is an even vaguer term, but it’s about creating the best online experience for your site visitors. That experience could be basic or quite luxurious, but it’s exactly what your customers are looking for.
User experience is all about thinking through your online presence from the customer’s point of view, making it easy for people to get involved with you. It’s another way to show your customers how much you love them.
Here is my five-part checklist for creating a terrific, customer-loving web presence.
1. Take care of the essentials
Every business has its boring basics: your contact details, your small print, your business address. Make sure that prospective customers can find these easily on your site.
Spellcheck everything and make sure someone else looks over your site. Errors and misspellings are like cracked windows in a building: they may not even be obvious, but they can signal a lack of care.
2. Identify what your people do here
In usability-speak, you need to map out the customer journeys.
For example, how do people find you? Do you get your business through Google, word-of-mouth, or in some other way? Do people become part of a community before becoming customers, or is it simply a matter of you meeting an immediate need?
And are there different kinds of customer, with different needs?
The answers to these questions will help you plan your site to accommodate these different kinds of people.
3. Respect the customer’s natural task flow
Many tasks (for example, making a buying decision) have a natural sequence, and you need to make sure that your site reflects that.
If you are a jewellery site, one typical customer task flow might be Browse jewellery > Browse category (pendants, bracelets) > Inspect an item > View an item up close > Check allergy and refund information > Check shipping rates > Add to cart.
If you really understand how your people buy, you can tweak things appropriately. For example, with consumer goods, many people like to shortlist and compare three or four different items. A good site will build this kind of thing in, reflecting the way that real people make decisions.
Usually, there are several main task flow patterns. Make sure your site performs well with all of them. Getting the natural flow wrong (for example, by selling too hard too fast) will throw your customer.
4. Provide all the essential detail to make buying low-risk
In the jewellery example above, the ‘essential detail’ is probably high-quality photography, so that the viewer can click a thumbnail and then inspect the item up close.
For a less tangible product, like coaching, the detail might be the course content, your blog, or case studies of how real people have used the advice to transform themselves. If people can get a real sense of the quality of your offer, they are going to be comfortable enough to buy.
5. Maintain your great user experience all the way through
If your brand is frothy and quirky, build some of that into every customer touch point (the thank you emails, the ‘Next Step’ screens, and so on). In this way, the whole experience is coherent: people don’t feel handed off to a faceless checkout process just when they want to feel loved and reassured that they made the right decision.
Your design can be staid or rebellious, artistic or deeply businesslike, as long as your customers can work with it happily. You’re aiming to provide a unified experience from beginning to end, that involves your customers and gives them exactly what they’re looking for. A great experience.
Questions about the who/what/why? I’ll be happy to answer them in comments.
ALSO, I am giving away one website critique to the CustomerLove community. This is a detailed, highly practical web critique with lots of specific recommendations on how you can improve your site. If you’d like to be considered, retweet the post and comment with a link to your site and why you’d like some professional feedback.
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Hi Alison! I loved your why I hate your website post.
My site needs some tlc. The bones are there but it’s missing something. I’d love a critique from you- I know I respect your opinions! Thank you for doing the giveaway!
Hi Deanna,
Marvellous. I’m guessing everyone else is exhausted by the challenge or not quite there yet. I have had a sneaky little peek. Drop me an email (alison@thehumanelement.co.uk) and let us sort something out.
Hi Alison – Thank you for the post. This is timely because I’m building a new community hub site with information, my coaching & public speaking offerings, and links to merchandise. Very helpful! You are spot on about the shopping task flow. Your story made me think about shopping for snow boots a few months ago. I went online to Zappo’s and my first step was typing in the search field – black snow boots. I chose about 3-4 styles and watched the videos to compare styles. I also liked how the site saved what I had looked at so I wouldn’t lose my choices and have to search again.
Yes, some of the fashion sites have got lovely little features, like mini catwalk video, so you can see the item being worn.
I think if you can match what genuinely goes on in someone’s head, you’re in a good place to design a site. The worst is when people put certain features in blindly, which slow everything down and make it hard to use.
For coaches, I think that good audio interviews (on someone else’s site or yours) can be a hugely powerful way of sampling someone’s real life style. This is the equivalent to the high-definition picture on a product site.
My pet peeve is sites that won’t tell you the shipping cost until you fill in *all* the billing info! Unless they’re selling a one-of-a-kind thing, I just leave their site for another that will be upfront about it. Shipping varies so much that it’s a significant factor in my buying decision. Are they trying to hide it, thinking that once you get to the final screen and unhappily discover it, you’ll just cave in and buy anyway? Or are they clueless about why this matters?
Yep, that’s a perfect example of a feature that is extremely important to many people. I guess it’s something that needs to be calculated once you have finalised your shopping – but if the shipping is too high, you may cancel anyway. Sites which do offer this kind of extra help (neatly) tend to do pretty well.