Five problems with your Website, and how to fix them

Problem #3: Everyone knows us in this industry
This is the catch-all excuse for every choice made on taste, convenience or politics within a company that hurts the user experience.

Web usability conventions are a lot like clichés: everyone hates them and everyone needs them. Yes, they feel boring and overdone. But they’re universally understood, which is how they became ubiquitous standards in the first place.

The fact remains that Websites adhering to basic usability guidelines are more successful. Here are some of the most popular, and egregious mistakes swept away by the misguided idea that your audience is somehow beyond needing an easy-to-use Website:

1 - Put your company or website logo in the upper left, and make it clickable to the home page. It’s what your user wants to see if your site is in a language that reads from left to right.

If your logo appears in any other location on the page, your user will start looking around for it. Now they’ve stopped performing the task they came to your site for, and have begun the malaise that ends a visit.

2 - Don’t reprint entire articles or long product descriptions on one page. Remember, scanning and clicking is what people want. Only include as much information as is necessary to encourage clicking to the next step in the process.

Once you get “below the fold,” your experience is living on borrowed time (see: clichés), and you’d better make that extra copy so valuable to your process that neither you nor your audience can live without it. Most likely, they can.

If you must put that entire three-thousand-word tome on your site, break it up into multiple pages to try and keep some rhythm of scanning and clicking alive.

3 – Don’t just use item numbers. On the flipside of the equation are B2B sites that put almost no product information on their sites, because the customers have catalogs, and only need quick ordering. The question is obvious: should you need a book to be able to operate a Website?

Next: Problem #4: What do I do next?
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