Growing a Business Website: Fix the Basics First
Summary: Clear content, simple navigation, and answers to customer questions have the biggest impact on business value. Advanced technology matters much less.
Top Three Design Priorities
Indeed, the biggest design flaws destroying business value typically involve:
1. Communicating clearly so that users understand you.
Users allocate minimal time to initial website visits, so you must quickly convince them that the site's worthwhile.
2. Providing information users want.
Users must be able to easily determine whether your services meet their needs and why they should do business with you.
3. Offering simple, consistent page design, clear navigation, and an information architecture that puts things where users expect to find them.
Get these three right, and you'll enhance your site's credibility, ease a user's way through the site, and thus do far more for the site's business value than any JavaScript trick.
Better Content
Content rules. It did ten years ago, and it does today. People don't use things they don't understand. Writing for the Web is still undervalued, and most sites spend too few resources refining the information they offer to users.
The same goes for photos: On countless sites, product images are too small, fuzzy, or murky, or they're simply shot from a bad angle, making the product hard to see.
Generally, all you need are plainspoken words and clean photos.
Elite Experience vs. User Experience
A final reason why attention flows to things that matter little to mainstream business websites: the Web's chattering classes tend to be overly engaged in the "Internet elite experience."
They actually care about the 'Net for its own sake, and go gaga over new ways of showing maps.
In contrast, average users just want to complete tasks online. They don't particularly like the Web, and they'd like to get back to their jobs or families as quickly as possible.
One of usability's most hard-earned lessons is that "you are not the user."
If you work on a development project, you're atypical by definition.
Design to optimize the user experience for outsiders, not insiders.
The antidote to bubble vapor is user testing: find out what representative users need. It's tempting to work on what's hot, but to make money, focus on the basics that customers value.
Source:
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, March 20, 2006:
Growing a Business Website: Fix the Basics First
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/design_priorities.html
Growing a Business Website: Fix the Basics First (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
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