4 Mistakes in User Experience Design

Your customers will spend most of their time online at websites other than yours. Therefore you must make the most of the time they give you.

Imagine that someone comes to your site. Do you envision it as a baseball player?

You approach the batting box. Now is your time to shine. This might be the only chance you ever get. As you wait for the pitch you contemplate the many ways you could turn this visitor into a customer. What will you do? How will you swing?

1. Will you show them a 30-second, full-screen video sequence that takes 2 minutes to load? Ah! Old school! Just like the TV days, but slower! Strike 1
2. Will you go "cutting edge" with a Flash microsite full of hidden navigation because the labels "clutter up the design?" It has pizazz, but no one can understand it. Strike 2
   
3. Will you try to reproduce the advertising campaign by displaying their magazine ads on their homepage at the expense of everything else? We'll make it "on-brand." That it's functionally useless shouldn't bother anyone, right? Strike 3. Batter up!
   
4. Will you demand the visitor's email address in order to access basic content about your services? Why should we give this stuff away for free? We wouldn't build this site except to get leads, anyway. Automatic disqualification. 

If you approach your audience in this manner, you may as well pack up your cleats and head back to the minors. You were more concerned about fulfilling your needs than those of your audience.

Here are some tips on how to avoid these 4 mistakes that will lose the game for you.

• Don't pitch them, delight them.
• Don't dazzle them with esoteric cleverness, dazzle them with service.
• Don't confuse advertising for branding. And under no circumstance should you assume visitors are falling over themselves to see your advertising.
• Don't ask for payment before you've convinced them that you can deliver value for that payment. And an email address is payment.

Don't entertain the notion that your audience is your adversary. Concentrate on building a site that is both useful and usable, and then win them over with your winning personality and service.

They came to you looking for a solution to their problem, not yours. Treat them accordingly. - Cam Beck