by Jamie Kiley
If you want a truly successful site, it's imperative that you
learn to anticipate how your visitors operate. After all, your
site is dependent on how your customers think, not how you
think.
What does this mean in a practical sense? For starters, it
means you must learn how your visitors think about their needs,
as well as how they search for solutions. Then you must design
your site accordingly.
Here are two questions you need to answer:
1. On what criteria do your visitors judge your products?
What do your visitors consider to be important when they are
evaluating a product on your site? You need to know what
features or benefits are going to be relevant to them and which
ones will influence their decision to buy.
For example, suppose you sell children's books. You might
list the title, price, and description for each book, but no
grade level. But that may be the piece of information that is
most important to your visitors.
In the event that the customer values criteria for which you
DON'T provide answers, you'll lose the customer. In other words,
if they are evaluating based on size, or material, or lifetime,
or something else, and you don't cover that criteria, you have
failed to answer their needs.
Even if your site gives all the necessary information, sites
often place the emphasis on the wrong information. In other
words, they don't understand which information is MOST important
to visitors.
My field of web design is a perfect illustration. When people
are thinking about getting a website, there are multiple
criteria they consider. Of course, they want to know how much
it's going to cost. But they also want to know what level of
quality they will get, how many bells and whistles they'll get,
what the level of support will be when their site is up and
running, as well as how easy it will be for them to edit their
site after it's finished.
Price, level of quality, bells and whistles, support and
customizability are all values that I could emphasize. But as a
web designer, it's important for me to understand which of these
values is MOST important to my visitors.
If you emphasize a particular benefit or feature when your
visitors care more about something else, you're not going to
connect with them as easily. Sorting out what your customers
consider important will help show more quickly and effectively
how your product meets your customers' needs. You'll also be
able to better anticipate questions or problems a visitor might
have.
2. How does a visitor search for a product?
Besides knowing what is important to a visitor when they are
evaluating a product, you must anticipate how a customer will
want to look for a particular product on your site. This
question is most relevant for sites that contain at least 5
different products, not single services.
Sometimes, this question overlaps with the first question,
since visitors will want to search for a product by whatever
criteria they consider to be most important. However, sometimes
the answers to the two questions are different. For example,
with a jewelry site, the value that might be most important to a
visitor might be quality, but the criteria they want to search
by might be size or length, age-appropriateness, or occasion.
Here are some ways by which visitors may want to browse:
- Price
- Age group
- Lifestyle
- Size, length or weight
- Materials/ingredients/components - Some people will be most
concerned about the various things that the product has inside
it.
- Color or style
- Gender
- Occasion
- Date - Some people will be looking for your newest items,
or will want something that was released at a certain time.
- Popularity
- Brand
For example, one of my clients who offers software training
needed to let students search for classes by the name of the
class as well as by the date the class was being offered.
Another client who owns a toy store needed to let customers
browse toys by age group, learning style, popularity, and brand.
Be sure not to limit the ways visitors can browse through
your products. If you offer only one method by which to search,
and your customers don't think of your products in those terms,
you'll fail to meet their needs, and they may never be able to
find the right product.
The bottom line? Make sure you understand what visitors care
about in a product and how they want to search for that product.
