+44 (0)20 3393 7223
+44 (0)20 3393 7223
Steve Krug wrote a seminal book on web usability entitled Don’t make me think, the principle being that most web users are short on time and “want to surf merrily through a well-designed site with minimal cognitive strain”.
It’s a minor point, but we believe the principle is more accurately described as “Don’t make me work”. Make your audience work too hard to find the information they’re looking for or to take the action you want them to and they’ll most probably go elsewhere. So we try to do the work for them, we try to make life easy for them and we believe they’ll reward you with loyalty, recommendations and custom.
People have a different relationship with a web site to the one they have with other marketing materials. In part this is because they’ve actively chosen to go to your site, and once there are actively involved in getting around. As such, the experience you create for them is crucial in forming the opinion they take away of you.
However, the main reason people have a relationship with a web site is because it’s a two-way medium. You speak to them, they speak to you and together you learn to understand each other. How you engage them differs from customer to customer, be it a newsletter, ongoing series of debates or whole online forum. What’s important is to keep the channels of communication open. Only a tiny percentage of the people who visit your site will become customers immediately. A great many more can be persuaded to become customers if you keep talking to them.
The above two points culminate in the idea that the customer is king. Some people argue that content is king, that content is the most important thing to get right. We believe the customer trumps the content because the content is there to serve the customer, not the other way around. It is true you wont get customers without content but the type of customer you want dictates the type of content you should provide.
What this means in practice is creating the type of site you hope your customers will like, but then continually seeking to learn more about their needs and tweak the site accordingly. This is not a sneaky way for us to get more work (we install content management systems on all sites so you can update the content and teach you how to measure and understand audience needs), rather it’s a plea for you to see your site as a living, breathing, organic entity that if given frequent attention will repay your investment many, many, times over.
