Tuesday 6 December 2011

When the web team gets it entirely wrong

Everybody who saw it within said version C was way too crowded and there was not enough white space. We were worried people would see it and sense overwhelmed with links. So states a marketing director at Career Builder in an excellent Marketing Sherpa case study. Turned out that the customers liked version C the best. Why they liked version C better is not actually the issue I want to explore here. What I want to explore is why so many web teams do not seem to understand their customers-or worse, think they realize their customers, and do not.

The single biggest reason web teams do not understand their customer is that they think their customers are just like them. They think that everybody who uses the website is pretty much as experts as they are at navigate around it. Some web team like to perform redesigns. They do not like to do these redesigns for forceful reasons such as to develop sales per visit, enlarge task completion, and improve the quality of search results. No, they like to do redesign because they are bored with the old design, or because they have got some new techie toys they did like to play with.

This is all quite harsh but it wants to be said. Not having a crystal clear understanding of the customer is like trying to construct a house on quicksand. Over the years, it is the number-one issue I have found with web management. Accept for starter that your customers are nothing like you. Accept that your personal preference and experience are the precise opposite of your typical customers. Accept that the things that you find very easy to do on your website, many of your customers will find very difficult to do. Accept that absolutely intelligent people can become incredibly stupid when you give them a mouse. Do you recognize that millions of people go to Yahoo and search for Google, and that millions of people go to Google and search for Yahoo?

Those who create things love to talk about features. People who buy things want to identify about benefits. Sell benefits, not features is the marketing equal of telling a kid to shut the door or brush their teeth. Too many web teams exist in a vacuum, and they end up create websites that are effectively acts of vanity publishing. There's organization focus, organization-speak and an guess that customers will just love to read sentences that begin with the name of the organization. Web teams are often fanatical with the mechanics of what they do.

Conversations are full with design-speak, techie-speak, usability-speak, and information architecture-speak. It is essential to understand the mechanics but it is much more necessary to understand the customer. It's not enough to infrequently test your customers like you were monitoring whether they had contacted some rare disease yet. You have got to learn to live in their world, see with their eyes, hear with their ears, view the website with their restricted experience. You've got to learn to really care about your customers, and, most significantly, to realize that what you care about, they really could not care less about.

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