Ten Principles for Creating a Better Website Experience:

What you need to know to research, evaluate and optimize your website

By Maxine Stoddard, Senior Research Manager, Retail Practice

Any company offering consumer products or services knows that an effective website is essential to growing business. Your website is often your company’s first touch point with customers and one of the chief ways they interact with your brand. When optimized properly, your website can help consumers find and evaluate your service or product quickly and cost-effectively. According to our research*, most North American consumers used a website for:

The average North American consumer spends less than three minutes on a website. While content is important, it isn’t always enough. Even the most thorough retail website can be a source of frustration for first-time visitors if the online experience doesn’t match up with the in-store experience. Information must be easily accessible so new and returning customers can find what they need as quickly as possible.

To help you optimize your website at every stage of development or redevelopment, Vision Critical developed the following suite of qualitative and quantitative research techniques:


1. Understand Your Audience
Who actually uses your website? Having a good understanding of your audience (or audiences) will help you determine languages, localizations, topics, and features for your website.

2. Understand Access Channels
How are consumers accessing your website? Are they using a mobile device? Optimizing your website for the 1-in-5 North American visitors viewing business websites via mobile can maximize its reach to your target audience.

3. Understand Hardware Limitations
What are consumers’ software and hardware limitations? Knowing your customers’ technical limits will help you optimize your website by avoiding cutting edge technology that can alienate potential visitors.

4. Streamline Your Structure and Navigation
How do users navigate through your site and how can the experience be improved? Can you leverage some high-traffic pages to drive visitors where you want them to go? Will that help you communicate your brand’s main messages in less than three minutes?

5. Prioritize Your Content
What is most important to your audience? Do your brand’s priorities align with the priorities of visitors to the site? Distinguishing between critical and desirable areas of content can help you achieve your tactical and strategic goals.

6. Balance Your Steak and Sizzle
Is the style of presentation overpowering or underselling the actual communication? Investigating the best mix of information and presentation can improve the impact of what is actually being communicated.

7. Evaluate Real Assets
Why use a proxy or mock-up when you can test your website in real-time? At Vision Critical we have tools and techniques that enable hands-on, real-world evaluation of your online assets, making results more accurate and actionable.

8. Measure Success
How is your website currently performing? Evaluating how well your current website works toward achieving its goals is the first step in a continuous loop of monitoring, evaluating, and updating its overall performance.

9. Understand the Competitive Context
How does your site measure up to your competitors? Compare your website’s strengths and weaknesses to those of your competitors. Understand which brand in your category is drawing the first visit (or the most traffic) to its website, and which is converting online traffic to online sales or brick-and-mortar visits.

10. Evaluate Brand Impact
Does your website give consumers an accurate impression of your brand? Does the website reinforce or contradict how customers perceive your brand? Develop the features, sections, and pages which will best support your brand message.

An brand-optimized website can be a critical business asset. For more information contact Maxine Stoddard in the Retail Practice.

*METHODOLOGY:

From June 9 to June 10, 2010, Vision Critical conducted an online survey among 1,006 randomly selected Canadian adults who are Angus Reid Forum panelists and 1,004 American adults who are Springboard America panelists. The results have been statistically weighted according to the most current education, age, gender and region data to ensure samples are representative of the entire adult population of Canada and the United States.