Good Web Design: Put Yourself In The Customers Shoes

When it comes to problem solving why you might not be getting the desired bounce rates, or visitors sticking around on your website sometimes it helps to imagine you are the user or customer. Putting yourself in the user’s or customer’s shoes is a fantastic way to visual the things that are wrong with your website.

Ideally, the real conclusive way to identify things wrong with your website design (and what they’ll tell you to do in any user interface design course) is to actually get someone that is unfamiliar with the site to sit down and use it in front of you – timing them, taking notes, making observations and all that.

But, failing that, putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and pretending to be a user coming across this site for the first time comes a close second.

See if you can answer these questions:

• What are the elements that stand out to you?
• If you were looking for contact information where would you go?
• Are the menu names obvious enough for you to know what’s there before you even click on it?
• Can you tell what the website owner wants you to do?
• What is the point of this site?
• Give yourself a few tasks of finding information, how long does it take you to do them?
• Is the layout intuitive and obvious?
• Can I interact with the website? How?
• … etc

I’m sure you get the idea. Come up with 10-20 questions along these lines and answer them giving yourself a true and honest rating. Note down things that need improving to revisit later.

If you have access to a person to act as your crash test dummy site operator ask them to complete several scenarios where they need to locate things on your site and get them to explain how they went about it. Video tape them in action if possible – this is going to be the most raw way to gain this very valuable feedback.

Things you (the designer) should be asking yourself out of this might be:

• Was there anything off putting about the design?
• Do things line up nicely?
• Does portray the correct feel? ie. “homely” compared to other sites we’ve already identified as “homely feeling”
• Is it clear how to navigate?
• Is it clear where to find information?

Good web design is all about the user, not the designer. This is something I think more than a few of us are guilty of, sometimes it helps to step back and take a look from another perspective.

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