Do you know your Users?

Taylor Wilson - March 18, 2010

Have you ever stepped back and looked at your website from a user’s perspective? You only get one first impression, so make sure it’s a lasting one. Good design and functionality is critical in giving a great user experience and is essential in building trust and relationships with your visitors. It is best to think about the experience from your visitor’s perspective, since you really wouldn’t be much without them.

Your website is your face to prospective consumers, and as a result can heavily impact your bond with them. Every interaction a user has on your site directly impacts the relationship they have with you and how they will portray your site to others. Poor design, content errors and confusion can take away from your credibility. A well-designed site, with simple navigation, good content and clear calls to action will impact your business favorably.

Streamline the funnel you want visitors to venture down. Let users know what you want them to do in a clear and concise manner. Don’t confuse or overwhelm the reader with an abundant amount of content and calls to action. Don’t cause frustration or reasons for them to want to leave the site with error messages and pop-ups.

Be sure to enable an analytics tracking system, such as Google Analytics, so you can better assess your users and their experiences on your site. Most analytics platforms allow you to dive deeper into how your traffic has arrived, how much time they spent on a page, if they ventured further into other pages of your site, or if they exited at a certain page, and didn’t venture any further. Analytics can supply you with the ability to monitor trends and patterns with your user’s engagement. Stats can reveal what pages are causing more problems than others. Knowing how your visitors are interacting with your site and what your site’s pain points are, will help to assist you in achieving the best user experience possible. Enabling an analytics platform can help to determine who your target market is, what their likes and dislike are and achieve a higher grade of user engagement.

Always keep in mind that your users are the reason that you can continue to stay in business, so making them happy should remain your main mission. You should consider your users as the main focus behind your design and development efforts and decisions.