Building a website to help website visitors, not the website owner, is the secret to a successful website.

Of course, it is possible to do both, but unless the focus is first and foremost on the target website visitor, neither party will benefit.

The website visitors won’t stay around for long and so the website owner will get little benefit from their visit either!

This may seem obvious and common sense, but as is often stated – common sense isn’t always common practice!

Amazon, Ebay, and Google – Great User Experience (UX) Examples?

First let’s take a look at well-known internet giants who have got this right:

Google – in spite of the Google Search Page being the most visited webpage globally, Google have resisted the temptation to fill the page with highly paid advertisements.

Instead, there is plenty of distraction-free white space, and the main focus of the page is exactly what you visited the web-page for – a big wide search bar.

Below the search bar, you may also see around 8 shortcuts to websites you visit regularly – again, the focus is on YOU, the website visitor – and making your life as fast and easy as possible.

Amazon – Pioneers of the 1-click check-out, Amazon’s user-experience focus is legendary. 

Their way of showing you all options and suppliers grouped together under 1 product search isn’t far short of genius – a simple idea, but difficult to implement in practice, but they’ve found a way, and consumers love it.

At Amazon board meetings they always have an empty chair at the conference table to represent their customers, and before finalising any decision, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezoz will turn to the empty chair and say something like – ‘this sounds great, but what does our customer think?’

Ebay – ever visited Ebay and been amazed at how specific their search options are to the product you are buying?

With just a few clicks you can refine your search down to just a few extremely relevant choices, something that other big retailers struggle to match.

Maybe the other retailers think it’s smart to not let you filter things down too narrow, maybe they hope that because you have to scroll past many less relevant items to get to the item you want, you’ll see something else you like and buy more than you intended – but the success of Ebay at the expense of more traditional retailers suggests the customer focussed approach is the one that works.

gov.uk heading in the right direction?

Anyone who thinks the UK government is out of touch with the people would naturally assume that their website (www.gov.uk) would be hard to navigate, complex, and difficult to understand.

In the past (and sometimes today), this is many people’s experience, but the website has come a long way in recent years, they seem to have a great team working on UX Design (User-friendly experience).

Their recent development to group complex multi-stage tasks like ‘applying for a driving licence’ or ‘starting a business’ under 1 heading, to save you needing to visit multiple departments to complete the task, is akin to the best practices set out by the likes of Amazon and Ebay.

See https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2018/10/17/building-a-better-gov-uk-step-by-step/

Got an example to add, or an alternative point of view?  Leave us a comment below!