Losing Business With Your Website
Usability guru Jakob Nielsen recently summarized common website mistakes that result in lost business, both online and offline. These include:
- Aggressive home page promotions that annoy users and diminish trust.
- Lack of consistent design and navigation throughout the site.
- Poor information presentation/navigation and lack of good search.
- Over-emphasis on being new and different at the expense of speaking the language that customers understand.
- Assuming that our opinions reflect user opinions/perceptions.
I describe the web as being the “ficklest” medium: users can leave your website with ridiculous ease. There is nothing keeping them there but your ability to convince them that you have what they want, and that it is more worthwhile to look at your offering than to look for someone else’s. The errors described above are among the most common causes for visitors not becoming buyers.
These are easy traps to fall into, but they aren’t terribly hard to avoid if appropriate actions are taken early on in the website design process. Awareness of potential problems is often all that’s needed to avoid them, so keep this list handy for your next web project.
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