Don’t forget about the people who use your website
Most websites are built around what the owner wants to say. The people who visit came with their own question. Here’s how to keep them in the room.
When a website project starts, the room is full of people with opinions: the owner, a partner, maybe a designer and a developer. The one person who isn’t there is the one the site is for. So the decisions get made around what the business wants to say, and the visitor’s question gets answered on page four, if at all.
You don’t need a research budget to fix this. You need a few habits.
Start with the visitor’s question, not your message
People arrive at your site with something specific in mind. “Can they help with my problem?” “How much will it cost?” “Are they near me?” “Can I trust them?” Write down the five questions you hear most often from clients, then check how quickly your homepage answers each one. If the answer is “after scrolling for a while”, that’s the first thing to change.
Watch one real person use the site
This is the most useful thing you can do, and it costs nothing. Ask someone who fits your typical client, not a friend who knows your business, to find something on your site while you watch. Don’t help. Don’t explain. Just notice where they hesitate, what they click first and what they say out loud.
Five minutes of this teaches you more than a month of guessing. You will almost certainly find something that seemed obvious to you and isn’t.
Use the words your clients use
Businesses describe themselves in industry language. Clients describe their problem in their own. A visitor looking for “someone to fix my leaking roof” may not recognise themselves in “comprehensive building envelope solutions”. Listen to how people describe their problem on the phone, and put those words on the page.
Design for the phone first
For most small businesses, the first visit happens on a phone, often in a spare minute. Check your site that way: one hand, outside, without your glasses if you need them. Can you read it? Can you tap the buttons without zooming? Does the form work without a fight?
Make the next step obvious
Every page should end with a clear answer to “what now?” Not a row of five options, one main one. And make that step easy: a form with three fields gets filled in more often than one with ten.
Don’t leave people out
Some of your visitors can’t see well, use a keyboard instead of a mouse, or use a screen reader. Clear contrast, readable text sizes, real labels on form fields and images with descriptions help them, and they make the site easier for everyone else too. In many places it’s also becoming a legal requirement for businesses, so it’s worth checking where you stand.
Keep listening after launch
The questions people ask you by email and on the phone are free feedback on your website. If the same question keeps coming up, the answer is missing from the site or hard to find. Add it, and the question will come up less.
A site built around its visitors doesn’t have to be plain or boring. It just has to answer their questions before it talks about yours. If you’d like someone to go through your site from a visitor’s point of view, that’s what my UX audit does.