How to Create an Experience For Your Website Visitors That Doesn’t Suck
Pretend you’re an arts lover that finds out about a local arts organization.
You navigate to the website, explore for a bit. The homepage is packed with info, calendar events, social media links, pictures, and links to all sorts of other pages.
You feel a little overwhelmed, but decide you’re interested enough to find out more info later… so you go on a hunt to sign up for email updates…
You swear you had seen it somewhere. Turns out it was only on the homepage, you head back there and click it. That takes you to a signup page which asks for your First name, last name, address, city, state, zip code, how you heard about the organization, an option to select your favorite types of arts events, phone number (hooray, an optional field!), and — finally — email address.
Frustrating, yes?
Why is that wrong?
The problem with this situation is that the entire experience is based on what the organization wants…
And has nothing to do with what the user needs.
The reality here is that the above experience will TURN PEOPLE OFF. They will give up because they don’t want to input so much information. That means you just lost a potential loyal customer!
All they wanted was to put in their email address and hear about future events… and they’d probably come to a couple too.
But selfish thinking got in the way. I don’t mean to name-call. That’s how we’re wired…
We want people’s information, so we’ll ask for it all on this form. Makes sense, right? But thinking about what you want is a great way to turn away customers.
Ahhh, I do that. What’s the solution?
What you should try instead, is getting out of your head and start thinking like your website visitors.
THIS IS THE #1 SECRET TO CREATING AN AWESOME USER EXPERIENCE
Give them what they want… simplicity. The easier it is the get started (ie. entering nothing but an email address to sign up to the newsletter), the more likely someone will do it. After time as they see value in your offerings, they will volunteer more information when you ask.
Give it a shot! See what you can simplify to give your patrons a better experience that they would like, vs. what you want. Let me know your results!
What parts of your website or business do you think you can simplify? Leave a comment!