There are too many times when I’m browsing the net and I come across a product or service site that is just poorly designed. I don’t have any products or services that I am offering to the public, but if and when I do, I will follow some of these basic rules.
- Upfront with dollar amounts - One of the most crucial rules in my mind is the clear, honest, unhindered display of all public pricing. This should seem like a no-brainer, but too many sites obscure, hide, or just fail to display their pricing information. Think of a car lot–every price is displayed on the window sticker of the vehicle because people value transparency. You’re not going to be able to lure people in with your fancy animations and sensational marketing babble only to slap a price on them at the very end. An honest company is a trustworthy company and a trustworthy company gains customers for life.
- Clear and honest support options - In the same vein, honesty goes a long way when it comes to support options as well. Hiding your true support policy in the fine print at the bottom of some obscure page isn’t helping anyone. Think again about the car analogy: people want to see the warranty information on the sticker, not on page thirty-seven of their contract. This means being upfront with your support options, right on the front page of your website. It also means having clear organization of those support options. These should include some or most of the following:
- Blog - Development blogs, product information and roadmap blogs, etc. are very helpful and reassuring to the customer. They indicate that products are in active development and give a special sort of window into the company, further promoting trust from customers.
- Forums - Not every company will find forums useful, but for those that do, forums are an invaluable part of the customer experience where the company can interact with customers transparently while showing potential customers that the business is handled well.
- Email - Every single product or service company with a website must have email-based support. As one of the fundamental modes of communication on the internet, email provides a crucial link between customers and the company.
- FAQ - Most companies can write down their most frequent support inquiries and post them on the website. This provides easy answers to the most frequent problems for other customers and ends up being a time saver for everyone.
- Phone - If you’re going to offer phone support options, they should be clear and prominent on the website.
- Concise, specific feature descriptions - No one likes marketing babble, especially not technically savvy customers. When you give a description of your product and its features, be specific and concise. Don’t tell me that your product “increases productivity, organization and overall bottom line”. Just tell me that it sorts my email contacts by birthdate (whatever it actually does).
- Fast website - This should be obvious as well, but company websites should be blazingly fast. I want to see all of your products and offerings before I head out the door for work in the morning. Every single page should be snappy and consistently available.
- Repetition is confusing - Repetition on any sales medium is horrible for customer understanding. Having eight bullet points that all start with “Do you…” or “Click here for…” makes the entire interface blur into one large confusing block of nonsense. This is the point where the user closes the window.
- Well-organized content - Your site should be just as easy to navigate for grandma and a Ph.D. in Computer Science. The point of a product or service site is to obtain information about the product or service as quickly and efficiently as possible. The organization of the pages on the site should be logical and as simple as possible. Some of the major problems that many sites have include the following:
- Too few pages - Having too few pages to cleanly describe products and services offered leads to either lacking information or a disorganized and cluttered site.
- Too many pages - In addition to the problem with too few pages, too many pages can be just as detrimental. The website should have as few pages as possible while accurately describing the products, support and other services. A site with too many pages often has trouble maintaining logical structure and ends with the user lost in some enigmatic abyss, never to purchase a product.
- Duplication of content - Too many sites duplicate content across several pages to make it seem like they have more content to offer. Quality over quantity, my friends. A potential customer is much happier to read five pages of concise, honest, and diverse content than fifteen pages of duplicated fluff.
- Strange non-tree flows - The natural structure of an informational website should be that of a tree. The customer starts out on a single page and from there is able to access the information needed. All pages on the site should adhere to this tree structure and avoid creating unintuitive links or flows that end up confusing the customer. A centrally managed menu or mapping system is a key feature of all well-designed sites.
I’m sure there are many more rules that would lead to good customer experiences, but this is my core list for now. If every product and service site followed these guidelines, we’d all be a lot better off.