User Experience #1 - Image by Paul Veugen
A recent study from Forester found that emotional and engagement is the key to gaining and keeping customers. Now has any well versed marketer will tell you this is marketing 101 but once you dive a little bit deeper into the report it reveals some interesting findings.
First it the report concluded that companies are investing 58% more in web design than last year, and 37% of these companies are investing in behavioral analytics. One shocking number is that 90% of companies fail when it comes to site experience.
Now for companies well versed in web marketing and engaging consumers online this is probably old news. The key here is to learn that the foundation of marketing should be your focus. With social media, earned media, and topics such as the semantic web increasingly up here in trendy news I can understand why people get overwhelmed.
What to Do About It
What I see a number such as 90% I immediately see whether not our clients, our web sites, or other things that I have a role and are falling into this trap.
To me the answer is focused on usability. Understand that you develop the websites, content, tools, and technologies for the user. That being said shouldn’t the number one metric we track be site experience?
#1 is Site Experience
I believe if we start with side experience as the number one goal it will keep any project focused. B at a marketing project, a web development project, or a social media engagement campaign. Now this is something we’ve always done and WebBizIdeas inherently in our process but we should take it a step further.
I propose that on every iteration, every step, every change, that we ask that one question…
How does this affect the user’s experience?