When designing a website, knowing what your customer’s needs are is pretty important. You’re probably thinking “well, duh”. Ok, sure, we all know that it’s important to know your customer, but what I’m talking about is understanding what your customer expects when they visit your website. In other words, put yourself in your customer shoes and ask yourself, does my website answer their needs? Answering these questions and improving your website can build strong customer relationships and increase your conversion rate.
 
Role Play as Your Customer
When analyzing a website for potential clients (a service we offer free at VigorFish), one of the things we like to do is role play and browse through the site from beginning to end as the customer. This allows us to point out potential problem areas.

When analyzing the website, we gather everything we need to know about the customer and write out a few real-life scenarios. For example, let’s say we’re reviewing a website for a company that sells shoes (i.e. Zappos.com - not a VigorFish client, I promise!). An example customer scenario/profile would be:
 
Customer: Joe Smith
Gender: Male
Age: 45
Shoe Buying Budget: $30 - $50
Needs: Not sure what brand he wants. He’s just looking for a comfortable shoe that he can where for working around the house, running errands etc.
What’s Important: Price and Comfort

Now that we have a few details of our fictitious customer Joe Smith, we can then proceed to go through the website as the customer and begin to list out all the problem areas.

In this scenario, the most important things that I would look for in the website are:

• Featured Selections – A featured selection of popular shoes due to the fact that the customer doesn’t know what brand he wants. Having a starting point of featured popular choices would be a good starting point.
• Group Shoes By Price Option - Ability to categorize shoes based on price would be helpful.
• Shoe Description – Detailed descriptions and features of the shoe would be very helpful since Joe is concerned about comfort.
• Customer Reviews – Customer reviews would be helpful to Joe since comfort is really important to him. Product reviews allows customers to make educated decisions.

If you take the time and run this process on the zappos.com website, you’ll notice that they’re actually right on and does answer all the needs from our scenario.

Is Your Website Designed Based On Your Customer’s Needs?
If you run a web business or are in charge of your company’s web presence - I would encourage you to run through this process a few times. Create a few customer scenarios and run through the site from the home page to the end conversion. Along the way, list out all the problem areas and things that your site doesn’t have that would benefit the customer. In doing so, you could end up with a long list of possible problem areas. There isn’t a need to correct them all at once. Just chip away at them one at a time and you’ll begin to see progress overtime.

If you would like a free evaluation of your website, please send me an email.

Tags: build stronger customer relationships, increase conversion rate, web design