Wise Observer

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “The customer is always right”. This applies to the website as well. One of the best ways to know whether your proposed site will be embraced by your customer is to become a customer yourself. You do this in everyday life outside of work already. Remember when you were at the electronics store and you wished the employee would stop goofing off with the other employee and come ask you if you needed help? Remember when you went online to pay your cable bill and couldn’t figure out where the pay button was? These instances will happen to your customer if you do not take the time to ensure that your website makes sense to your customer.If you aren’t savvy as to what a customer might or might not like on your website, hopefully you have an analytics tool that provides you with data and metrics that you can use to determine interaction, engagement and conversion of your website. In addition, you can refer to your customer opinion data if your site has this feature. Customer opinion data is a great way to get actual opinions straight from the customer’s mouth. Granted, you may have to take a lot of it in stride because customers are more apt to leave negative feedback than they are positive feedback. However, many times you will be able to tell very easily if there is a certain feature or page that is not working well for your customers. Heuristics testing is a great way to find out first hand from your customer if a particular design is intuitive to the customer. Finally, if you don’t have any of those tools or options, you can always scour the Internet for blog postings from individuals to see if anyone is posting anything (good or bad) about your site. Keep in mind that “the customer is always right” does not mean that the customer should always get away with the loot. It just means that, if you don’t know your customer, your key performance indicators will reflect this in the data; and worse, your customers may talk to each other about it.