Early Customer Feedback Is Essential For Successful Web Design

Posted: Feb 11th, 2010 | Rating: 0/5 | Views: 59 | Rank Points: 590 | Comments: 0

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Many examples which are nominated for worst web design awards are not from the professional business world.

For underperforming websites, right from the launch there are high chances of increased cost for later changes and many differing opinions from the stake holders simply leaves you to one option which is to directly ask your users! And the best thing is the earlier you do that in the interface design process, the more cost-effective you can integrate the findings from user testing.

Now understanding the process of how most websites are created, you can see that there are many stake holders involved in this process and they all want to add their opinion to the website. But there are chances of too many cooks spoil the broth. Some websites must serve several; sometimes even contradictory purposes, but the important question is who decide how to balance this out. It is not necessary that all well designed and pretty looking website perform well. It may possible that what's good and crystal clear to the graphics designer sometimes does not match at all with how real-time users are going to use the website, when website is launched. It may happen that users get confused by stylish looking new design ideas, cryptic wording or just crammed

windows and lots of attention grabbing stuff on it.

You should know that an underperforming website can jeopardizes your overall website ROI, just caused by lower conversion rates. Therefore you need to implement changes sooner or later. Here you will lose because your website's ROI drops through lower conversion rates, this can be counted as opportunity cost and the overall ROI plummets again, when implementing necessary changes on your already developed website can cost you lot more compared to the same changes had been made in the stage of prototyping or requirement gathering stage of your interface design or website project.

Many studies and survey have shown that in early stage the user testing helps to find roughly 95% of the usability related issues in website or interface design. The good news for you is, you only need about 5 qualitative user tests for extraordinary result! It is strongly advisable that don't test with the colleague on the desk right next to you. Instead you should invite real users from your targeted user groups to catch open feedback from them or watch them browsing through your design concept. But you need to make sure that you need to deal with the psyche of your test users in the right way.

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