Put Yourself in Your Customer s Shoes

Put Yourself in Your Customer's Shoes

This is another one of those classic business homilies that applies as much on the Internet as it does anywhere else. You can't really do it, of course, because you know too much about your business to view it with fresh eyes. Your Web site is there for people who know nothing (or at least very little) about your business. You put it up to enlighten them, not (hopefully) as an ego-gratification device. At the same time, self-promotion, in the business sense, is its primary purpose. You probably will not be able to strike an appropriate balance on your own. You need help.

If you have a large, well-funded business there are many companies that run focus group studies to help you get a customer's eye view of your operation, and many of them will as happily apply their methods and expertise to a proposed Web site as they will to any other aspect of your company for a fee, naturally.

A less expensive alternative is to go first to co-workers, then to friends and relatives, and ask them to judge your site. Ideally, to duplicate the typical customer experience as closely as possible, they should look at your site on their own home or office computers, using their preferred operating systems and Web browsers. Then you'll find that, no matter how firmly you ask for honesty, even brutal honesty, a lot of your informal focus group friends are just going to say, "Looks fine to me."

This is when you need to start asking direct questions.

Some good questions to ask follow:

(all prefaced with, "From information on our Web site, did you learn…")

• Our business name?

• Where we are located?

• Exactly what products/services we offer?

• Who runs the place?

• How to contact us?

• What we look like (both facility and people)?

• When we're open?

• Why you should buy from us instead of someone else?

Note that these questions follow the old journalistic "Who, what, when, where, why, and how" pattern. This is a good pattern for a business brochure, either online or print, too, because these are the basic bits of knowledge a customer needs in order to find a vendor that fits his or her needs. Everything else on your site is spin, puffery, and cuteness that can be classified under the "Why you should buy from us" category. It's fine to have lots of it, if that's your business style, but you must not let it obscure the basic stuff.

But these are really just "loosening up" questions. You've used them to establish a dialog beyond the "Looks fine to me" level. Now you can launch a more substantive inquiry. Some examples follow:

• How long did our main page take to load? Did it take longer than you would have liked?

• Were the pictures too big? Too small? Just right?

• Did we tell you enough about our business? Should we have told you more? If so, what? Should we have told you less? Did our text ramble too much? Should it be shortened?

• Did we put information in the right order? How could we reorder our site layout and content to make it easier to use?

• How about the colors? Was our text easy to read? Could you tell hyperlinks from ordinary text without any problem?

You can certainly think of many additional questions specific to your business. Ask them. Ask them of friends, relatives, customers, and anyone else you know. Ask 10, 20, even 100 people. Listen closely to their answers and write them down. And then, steel yourself and get ready for the hardest part of this whole process: