Website usability is the key to a healthy, productive website and happy customers. Because a site that lacks focus, uniformity and usability can undermine the main goal of your website, it’s important to take a step back every now and again and ask yourself whether or not your website is truly working.
To do this, you’ll have to step into your users’ shoes.
This can be extremely useful, and may help you find answers to questions that frequently plague webmasters and business owners, such as:
Why do so many purchases get abandoned in the shopping cart?
Why is one page/product so much more popular than another?
or
Why is my bounce rate so high?
Ready to look at your website with fresh eyes?
If you’re ready to take a critical look at your website, take a step back and pretend you don’t know anything about your business. Maybe you have a question related to a certain product or service; or maybe you, like your users, have come to a particular page after performing a search for a keyword.
Whatever the case, it’s important to look at your site from a few perspectives. Take a look, for example, at the homepage, an interior page, the contact page, and the shopping cart.
From the homepage ask:
From an interior page, ask yourself these questions:
From the contact page, ask yourself:
From the shopping cart, ask yourself:
By looking at these aspects with fresh eyes, and an open mind, you will be able to see whether or not your website’s tools, content, and organization, is truly doing what you need it to do: engage your customers with useful content while moving them seamlessly from introduction to conversion.
If it’s not, it may be time to take a step back and begin to think about how you can reorganize your website and retarget your content to make the most out of every pair of eyes that finds your site.