When designing your website it’s vital to think about how a visitor will use and interact with your website, you need to think carefully before creating any sort of graphics about the customer journey through your website and how you can turn them into a buyer. This is were a well thought out and designed website will provide a great return on your time and financial investment.

Competitor research

Looking at your competitor’s gives you a great insight into what has been successful and what has failed in the past, although this is certainly not a blue print for a well designed website, you can gain some foundation knowledge on how the industry currently operates on the web and how you can take it in a new direction by building a well designed website.

Key things to take away from your competitors

• How do they convert visitors to buyers?
• Do they have a simple goal funnel (customer journey) process?
• What call to actions are they using?
• How do you navigate through the site? Is there a search system?
• Promotions, offers, discounts, pricing – are you competitive on a basic business level?

Armed with this information you can start thinking about how a visitor might act when they come to the website and how you are going to convert them into buying customers.

Consumer research

Put yourself in the shoes of your customer, what is the driving force behind a purchase decision for your product or service?

• Is it price based, if so you have an easy job on your hand, get the lowest price products and set up a simple ecommerce store and you should start seeing a market share take over.
• Feature & added value decision: If your product is in competition with similar priced products and you have added value, features or improved design for example, then your website needs to make this loud and clear, you might want to think about comparison tables, or bold feature graphics to highlight the benefits of your product, or if you can make a video and show why your product is a must have.
• First to market: If your product is brand new and makes it own market then you need to establish your own market place by solving a problem for the customer, and explain this on your website is a easy to grasp way that’s is super clear and delivered within the top fold of your homepage.

There are so many more purchase decision factors, which is outside the realm of this post, but do some research on “consumer buyer behaviour” and you will come up with ideas of you own.

User interface design

Now you know what your competitors are doing and how customers make a purchasing decision you can start planning how the website should be designed, from a graphical, user interface and goal funnel point of view. Start by wire framing out the website and drawing the elements that will make up your website on paper, thinking about how your customers will browse the website, where they will look for important information about your products and how they are going to move through your website to achieve the goal. Lets take the example of an ecommerce store…

1. Customer wants a electric golf trolley, but is unsure what makes a great electric golf trolley, they visit your website (via Google rankings, advertising, email campaign, etc)
2. On the homepage you need to instantly attract the visitor to the fact you sell golf trolleys by a strong call to action graphic, this qualifies you in the first problem of “I want to buy a golf trolley”. Call to action clicks through a product information and purchase page.
3. Here you have information about the golf trolley, how many holes you can play, how easy it is to store and fit into your car, along with pricing information and a small feature comparison table of major competitors. This fulfils the customer requirements and turns them on into buying the product.
4. The customer can easily add this product to the shopping cart and at this point you have a captive audience and you can try to upsell related products. The customer then checks out with an easy to follow, and secure payment system.
5. The payment system needs to show loud and proud that it’s secure, it has an SSL certificate and makes the customer feel happy that their credit card information will be secure to finalise the transaction.

The user interface design in this case is all firstly capturing the attention of your visitor through strong call to action graphics, then displaying the relevant information in a easy to ready manner and finally allow them to checkout in as fewer clicks as possible, the customer journey is complete and you have a delighted customer!

Tags: buyer behaviour, customer conversion, user interface

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 9:15 pm and is filed under Web design tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.