It’s hard to look at your own website and evaluate user experience objectively. Because you’re so familiar with your business and marketing objectives, you tend to see what you intended to create rather than what exists. If you want to create a good user experience, it’s probably not enough to try to see your site through your customer’s eyes. A helpful tip is to think about what truly bothers you as a consumer when you visit websites, and make sure you aren’t committing those same online sins. Here are some examples of things people find pretty unforgivable online:
- Not having a website at all or having one that’s essentially a business card. Few companies or organizations can really get away with this. It might work for someone whose whole business model is selling things on Facebook Marketplace or whose target market is over 75, but, for the most part, no one will think you’re a real business if you don’t have a real website.
- Out of control pop-ups. If three ads open on my phone screen and block my view of everything else, you have lost my business. I hope the three cents you earned can offset the cost of losing customers. Pop-up ads are, I (begrudgingly) guess, a necessary evil, but you have to know better than to have them distract from your content. Nothing makes people bounce off your site faster than not being able to actually get to your site.
- An unresponsive site. I complain about this all the time, but there are still sites that aren’t optimizing their content for mobile devices. Over half of all web traffic is on phones. To me, as a consumer, if I land on a site that’s impossible to use on my phone, I assume the business doesn’t care about their site users. Especially since it’s such an easy fix! Almost half of all websites are built with either WordPress or Wix, and any theme created in the last few years is automatically responsive. You can change to one of those themes with a minimum of effort (basically, backing up your content and checking to make sure everything looks and performs right after the switch) without even having to create your own breakpoints. If your site has to manually be made responsive, you should invest the time or money to make it so. You can maybe be given a pass if your site has been online for many years and you’re completely broke. Otherwise, I would make it a priority. Alienating customers isn’t worth the savings.
- A site that hurts the eyes. Sites with no white space, bad contrast, crazy fonts, busy graphics, and multiple areas of motion all going at once are all annoying. Use a clean design that respects the hierarchy of information presented. Limit pages to one main purpose. Leave space for your eyes to rest. Don’t use colors that clash or create a jarring effect. Make sure text is readable. Remember that the style has to serve the substance.
- A confusing structure, hierarchy, and/or menu. When you seek out someone’s site specifically to give them business or find out more about them and you can’t find the information you’re looking for, it’s beyond frustrating. No vital information should be more than three clicks from Home. Regardless of how creative you are or want to be, you should follow existing conventions to make things easier for your customers. Have top level menu items that make sense to users right away (Home, About, Products, Services, etc.). Make other information easy to find. For example, your About page should lead to pages related to your mission, history, career opportunities, etc. Write out the pages of your site as an outline and make sure the outline makes sense.
- A check out system that’s hard to use. This is especially egregious because users are trying to give you money and you’re making it hard. If you have a shopping cart set up or payment gateway that’s slow, unresponsive, not secure, or otherwise glitchy, you’re literally turning down money.
- Outdated content. This got especially bad during and right after the pandemic, which is understandable, but now is the time to update your site if it’s still full of old information. The most common offense are blogs that were started with the best of intentions and haven’t had new posts in months or even years. Still other sites will have calendars of events that end years before, staff email addresses for people who don’t work at the company, descriptions of services they no longer provide, or outdated rates. There’s a professional association I’ve been trying to join since 2021. The published membership rates are from 2020, as is the calendar, and the membership directory. The About page has been under construction for years. It links to bios for the board members, but clicking any of those links takes users to the Wix login page. I would call them about this, but there’s no contact info, which brings me to my last point.
- No contact or bad contact information. Contact forms that go to no one, phone numbers that aren’t in service, and email addresses that aren’t monitored are all terrible. If you don’t want customers, just say so. If you do want customers, you should have clear, updated contact information that people can actually use to get in touch with you and get a response.
Substance and Style 