Design, don’t want to know what your best friend thinks, Your site design is for getting results, not for pleasing friends

Is your best friend an expert in internet design?

If the answer is no, then ignore the opinion of them, their wife, boyfriend, son, etc. One of the big problems that designers face on a daily basis, is that everyone has an opinion of like or dislike. But especially dangerous is the opinion of administrators who have the power to decide, even though they usually don’t understand anything about web design. They become even more dangerous when they use the expression “make like Amazon”. First, Amazon is Amazon, it has 19 years in the market, spends billions in technology, pays attention to the customer and has already educated its own. Second, your company is not Amazon.

Let’s start at the beginning, a website has one or several goals, namely, (i) to sell, in the case of an e-commerce website, (ii) to attract an audience, if the business is to sell advertising (a blog or newspaper), (iii) to create branding, etc. The design must fit the objectives of the site and of each page and must respect some simple rules:

1. Look at each page of the site, define the specific objective and design it for that purpose. For example, if you are showing a product and the goal is to sell it immediately, place the “buy now” button prominently.
2. You have 8 seconds to explain to your customer what your page is about and motivate him to continue. What is obvious to us, on our site, may not be to our customers. If they come to your site and do not understand it, or do not see something attractive, they will go to your competitor. to your competitor.
3. Test with your target market. Design is increasingly about metrics and testing. If you want something simple, find three people who are your target market and give them the basic tasks they should do on your site, such as buying a product and retrieving a password. Sit quietly watching what they do and learn how to optimize the site. In a usability test I did on an ecommerce client’s site, 35% of customers couldn’t buy because a “checkbox” (a box they were supposed to put a cross in) didn’t look right. Put in evidence, sales increased immediately.
4. Don’t invent. There are conventions and user habits about what kind of menus, categories, buttons, etc. Your goal is to simplify the user’s life. If your business doesn’t depend on innovating in design, don’t innovate without knowing well what you are doing.
5. Make incremental changes and evaluate the results – look at your site metrics in Google analytics and see how each page is performing (how many people abandon the site on that page, for example). Make small changes and evaluate whether the results get better or worse (see Google optimizer). By changing the site in radical way you don’t know how to measure the individual consequences of each decision and may worsen the results.

Companies make major structural changes and investments to increase sales by 5%, but in many cases, confirmed in the market, design is the way to achieve this goal faster and at less cost.