After the owner or a developer of website, it is important to keep you end-user or site visitor in mind. As a product manager professional, I had to constantly keep in mind, questions like:
- Who is my user and what are they trying to accomplish with my product?
- What need does my product address?
- Is the product easy use and for users to find what they need?
- How does it fit into their business process or workflow?
When you are familiar with a product, it can be easy to forget that your users don’t know everything you know. They may not have become familiar with all of the features and tools, and where they are located. Because you are developing the product and are constantly testing it, you know. What may seem obvious to us, because of familiarity, may not obvious to a website visitor.
Please indulge me for a few moments to give an example. I worked on developing a user friendly too, l like WordPress or Squarespace, early in the Internet days. At that time, desktop web development tools included products like Dreamweaver and Adobe GoLive. I saw a need a need to empower users to manage their site content using their web browser instead.
My design goal was to minimize the number of clicks it took for a user to achieve their goal. Whether it was a simple text update or uploading media to include in their web content. My goal was one to two clicks. I had one user, who I will call “Mary”, who was a musician. She was my ideal user prototype because she was not technical. She became my point person for UI testing. If “Mary” could figure out how to accomplish her task, without me instructing her but simply looking at the UI, then I considered that a success. Working with her helped me simplify the user experience and eliminate confusion.
Clarity and simplicity should be the thoughts going into website navigation and content architecture. This typically is not a problem on smaller websites but it can become an issue when you have more complex sites. It might be helpful to find someone, who does not know your site and content, and ask them to find certain information on your site, just to see how easy or difficult it is to find. Get some feedback.
Don’t loose traffic and potential customers because your site navigation or content architecture is too difficult to follow. May it easy for them to find what they are seeking.