I'm sure you're thinking, "Of course I care what my customer wants; I'd be out of business if I didn't." But I bet you are thinking almost completely about the product or service you offer your customers. What about the way you communicate to your customer? Do you offer them information the way they want it, or are you just talking at them?
There is probably no other single medium where businesses show as much disregard for how their customers want to receive information than their website.
Think about how the process of building or refreshing a site goes – you often start by organizing the information based on how your company is structured, using terms you use to refer to your products, services and the overall organization. If you do decide to look outside your company for a site structure, you most likely look to your competitors for the "industry standard" navigation and information structure – but what do you think they based their decisions on? I have often looked at the similar clunky navigations that you will see in a particular industry and wondered, "Which competitor do you think did this first that they have all now fallen in line?"
After a basic structure for the site's information is selected, the rest of the site's navigation elements are usually left to the IT department or digital agency to fill in. Elements such as navigation location and structure, as well as search functionalities and site applications are often handled as though there is a standard manual for how all sites should function.
But where is the customer in this process? If you built products with this much disregard for what your customer wanted, you'd be out of business, or you'd be IBM – oh snap! Seriously, have you tried to navigate their site? (IBM, let's build a smarter website before taking a swing at building a smarter planet.)
To truly build a professional website that serves up the information your customers want in the way they want to receive it, a website build or redesign needs to start with a web usability study. Conducting such a study will not only allow you to determine how your targeted customers would like to see your information structured, but will also give insights into what information or functionality they would like to see from your company that they are not seeing from any competitors currently. In addition, there are numerous other benefits that can come out of a web usability study, for example:
- Providing insights into your potential customer's purchase decision process and what online resources are most influencing their decision.
- Determining which key phrases are used when conducting online searches for your products or services.
- Identifying what site information is ancillary to your customer's buying decision and would only serve to distract from the conversion process.
- Exploring products or services where customers would like to see more detail.
JMG has conducted numerous web usability studies for clients in a variety of industries, including a recent study for S.C. Farm Bureau Insurance where we explored how potential insurance customers prefer to interact with an insurance company website and discovered a number of interesting insights such as those listed above. Since we were also building the new site, these insights were turned directly into the content selected for the site, how that content was structured and even the functionality the site offered users. JMG structured the Farm Bureau Insurance web usability study to glean actionable results by combining focus groups for the discussion of insurance buying behaviors with quantitative analysis of users' ideal site structure for designing the content navigation. The results provided a site plan and structure that were based on actual customer desires, not company dictates.
Unsure if your site could also benefit from a web usability study? Drop me a comment and we can look at whether the potential customer insights would provide you enough value to make the investment worthwhile.