Let’s Talk Turkey: The Five Most Important Things Visitors Want from Your Website

What do your visitors want from your website?

The answer to this question depends on a number of factors, including the nature of your business, the type of person who typically visits your site and what they hope to accomplish while they’re there. However, there are certain basic needs and expectations that transcend these specific circumstances and are universal to all visitors.

Over the past few months, I’ve conducted an informal survey of clients, coworkers, friends, family and others that I’ve encountered, asking them this one simple question:

“What do you want when you visit a website?”

While there were many different responses to this question, there were five that I heard again and again. Each person I spoke with mentioned at least one of these five, and many cited more than one.

Let’s take a look at these five critical elements that visitors want from your website:

1. Ease of use

Without a doubt, the most common answer I heard was that people want websites to be easy to use, and this makes perfect sense. After all, it’s 2014. We’re all well versed in using the Web to conduct the business of our day-to-day lives. There’s no reason your website should require a learning curve just to get from point A to point B. Yet, far too many sites are guilty of presenting visitors with an experience that’s confusing, frustrating and completely unsatisfying.

The definitive guidebook of usability, Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, asserts that web applications must explain themselves. When a visitor looks at a web page, the next step should be obvious and intuitive. With the world of options available at their fingertips, visitors have next to no patience when it comes to dealing with sites where there are any sort of obstacles standing in their way. If they can’t figure out where to go and what to do next in as little as three seconds, it could well be a deal breaker that causes them to abandon your site – and by proxy your business – altogether.

Navigation menus that are difficult to use, important content that is buried deep in your site and nearly impossible to find or a design schema that does not provide visitors good visual cues and clear calls-to-action to direct their experience are all pitfalls that must be avoided if you want to ensure that your site meets the acceptable threshold for ease-of-use.

2. Good information architecture

Just as nearly everyone I talked with said they want a site that’s easy to use, many also said that they want information to be easy to find. The key to achieving this is by creating a concise, logical navigation structure. If your site encompasses a large repository of information and content, it’s a good idea to include a search tool that lets your visitors to use keywords to drill down to the information they’re seeking right away rather than hunting and clicking through the site page by page.

There is a long-held myth of website design that claims all content on a site must be able to be reached in no more than two clicks. While that might sound great in theory, in reality, the task of developing an effective navigational structure is rarely that straightforward.

For example, if you had a website with a hundred pages of content, you could theoretically have direct links to each one of those 100 pages right on your home page in order to allow visitors to access all of your content in only one click. Awesome, right? No – not awesome at all. While that massive menu of links might offer one-click access to your site’s entire content catalog, it will also be a confusing, gargantuan mess that provides visitors with little in the way of clear direction.

Remember, visitors to your site are making instinctive decisions in as little as three seconds. They do not want to sift through a laundry list of dozens of links in order to find the one that’s relevant to them. Rather, they want to make easy, logical choices that get them to where they want to go without a lot of guesswork and back-button clicking.

3. Fast load time

Another popular answer I heard in the course of my survey was fast load time. A webpage that takes too long to fully load is major source of frustration for visitors. After all, if they want to make a decision in as little as three seconds, and your site takes seven seconds to load, chances are good that they’re going to choose to navigate away from your site before they ever even see it. Seven seconds may not seem like a long time, but in the instant-gratification-driven world of the Internet, it’s practically an eternity.

If your site is slow to load for visitors who have a fast Internet connection, you’re really going to be in trouble with users who don’t have the benefit of a lightning-speed connection, including those on mobile devices who might be in a location where network coverage is slow or spotty.

Ensuring that your site loads quickly is crucial to providing an optimal experience for all visitors, regardless of their device or quality of connection. After all, no one has ever complained that a site loaded too fast for them!

4. No ads

Advertising is a necessary evil for many websites. If your business model depends at least in part on revenue generated by ads on your site, then removing those ads simply because visitors don’t care for them is probably not a realistic option. Still, the fact that ads offer little more than an annoyance to most visitors is something that you should be aware of.

When considering ads for your website, you must take into account not only the needs of your business but also the needs of your customers. Ads that make your site more difficult to use should be avoided at all cost, especially intrusive ads that take over the screen or obstruct areas of your content with over-the-top, in-your-face animation or video. These “take-over” ads are impossible for website visitors to ignore; they have to interact with them on some level, even if it’s just to hit the “close” icon, in order to achieve their purpose in coming to your site. Of course, the inability to disregard these ads is why advertisers love this format, but if you use them on your site, you’re running the risk that your customers and prospects will quickly tire of the hassle of dealing with them and seek out a competitor who will offer them a more user-friendly browsing experience.

Ads may be a fact of life for your website, but the types of ads you allow is well within your control. Listen to your customers, and make sure you choose advertising display options that do not compromise the overall quality of their user experience.

5. No bugs

One of the worst experiences a user can have online is when they have invested time in a site, gone through the necessary steps to complete a transaction – whether it’s to make a purchase, sign up for a membership, complete a request form, etc. – only to have the site crash and burn during the final steps of that transaction. This is a soul-crushing experience and one of the best ways to drive customers away for good!

Make sure that your website is working as expected at all times. If you’ve recently incorporated new features into your site, thoroughly test not only those new features but also all other existing subsystems within the site to ensure that no problems have been introduced along with the new code that has been added to the site.

Even if you’ve not recently added any new features or functionality, you should schedule routine testing to make sure the site is operating as expected and does not crash just as your visitors are about to cross the finish line and complete a successful transaction.

What I didn’t hear

The five elements covered in this article are ones that I heard again and again during my experiment. Of course, I heard many other answers as well, including “works well on my phone,” “good prices,” “information in Spanish” and “easy-to-find contact information.”

One of the most interesting discoveries to come out of my survey process was the answers that I didn’t hear. Not one person said that they wanted a site that “looked good” or had a “nice design.”

Nor did I hear any comments that people wanted features like “live chat” or “contact forms.” Does this mean that visitors do not want an attractively designed site or access to helpful features? Of course not – it means that those things should already be a part of a good site by default.

Great design is unobtrusive; it provides elegant yet simple visual cues that make the site easy to use and make information easy to find – two of the most commonly mentioned things that people want from a site. So, while the participants in my informal survey may not have cited beautiful design explicitly, they were, in fact, asking for it by proxy.

Great design and helpful features are not only important; they are expected.

In summary

It should come as no surprise that visitors want a site that is easy to use, loads quickly and works seamlessly. All of these should be par for the course for any site, which makes it all the more surprising to see so many sites that fail in even these most basic areas.

When evaluating the effectiveness of your site, start with these fundamentals. If your site fails the test in any one of these areas, then no amount of flashy features or advanced technology can compensate for the poor experience you’ve provided for your users. First and foremost, master the basics that visitors demand and then work up from there!

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Deal-Breakers and Dead-Ends: Six Turn-Offs That Alienate Website Visitors

Without question, the task of driving new visitors to your company’s website is not easy. Success requires serious strategic planning and a significant investment of resources, from content marketing and social media promotion to search engine advertising and offline marketing initiatives. So once those hard-won visitors arrive, why in the world would you immediately turn them away? Well, you certainly wouldn’t do so intentionally, but there may be deal-breakers and dead-ends lurking within your site that will repel a potential new customer faster than a cheesy pick-up line and cheap cologne. Here are six mood-killers that you must avoid if you hope to woo new customers, entice them to engage with your site and provide such a positive experience that they will tell all their friends what a great catch you are:

1. Download our app

If you’ve invested in creating an app for your brand, naturally you want to bring this to the attention of mobile visitors and encourage them to download it. But it’s all too easy to cross the line between promoting your app and perturbing your customer. Recently, I was in the process of working on an email marketing campaign using the popular service Constant Contact. I found myself with a spare moment between meetings, so I grabbed my iPad and set out to make a few quick edits to my draft. When I logged into the site and selected the email I wanted to edit, I was greeted with a message asking me if I wanted to download “QuickView”, their app for iPad and iPhone. But I was in a rush and had no interest in downloading and figuring out how to use their app to accomplish the simple task of making changes to an email I had already begun crafting. So I clicked “No, thanks” and was then returned to my list of emails. Once again, I clicked the email that I wanted to edit – and once again I was greeted with the prompt to download the app. I was stuck in a loop of non-productivity. Unless I installed the app, I could not complete my desired action on my iPad. By any standard, this was a very poor user experience. Unfortunately, this is not an unusual scenario. If you browse the Web on your mobile device with regularity, you’ve undoubtedly encountered this type of “Download our app!” a number of times. However, the problem arises when downloading an app is the only viable way to interface with a site via a mobile device and the objective of providing a good user experience is sacrificed in the interest of securing a permanent spot in the user’s pocket. Instead of trying to force your app on mobile visitors, take a more subtle approach. For example, displaying a small banner at the top of your site’s mobile view is a great way to make users aware of your app without disrupting their workflow or compromising the quality of their experience. Never, ever require your visitors to download an app to use your site; rather show them the respect of allowing them to interact with your brand in the way that they most prefer, whether that’s through a browser or through your app.

2. Give us your digits

We get it. When a new visitor comes to your website, you want to capture as much information about them as quickly as possible so that you can continue your engagement with them long after they’ve moved on to other corners of the Web. With this motivation in mind, there are many sites that immediately greet new visitors with a pop-up-style message. Instead of seeing the expected home page content, the user is presented with a request to complete a form to provide their contact information in exchange for a welcome discount offer or to follow the company on Facebook for future updates and promotions. Either way, these pop-ups are very disruptive to the user experience and provide obstacles that only make it more difficult for the visitor to accomplish what they originally came to the site to do. Think about this experience for a moment. Yes, it would be ideal if every visitor to your site would willingly complete a short form that gives you invaluable data. But in reality, no one comes to your site for the express purpose of helping you market to them, so by giving such a message top priority, you are telling them that your needs are more important than theirs. That’s a pretty poor way to start the conversation. This phenomenon is so pervasive that there is even an entire website – tabcloseddidntread.com – dedicated to these types of interruptive messages. While the writing on the site is a bit snarky, the point it makes is a valid one: these messages create a poor user experience from the outset. As a result, any value you might gain in collecting user data is quickly negated if that user has no interest in continuing their engagement with you because you’ve created such a negative first encounter. Instead of leading off the conversation with your survey request, Facebook follow prompt or current promotion, simply allow your visitors to dive right into the site to find the information they’re seeking or complete their desired task. Keep your mailing list sign-up and Facebook links in your site’s universal framework, and if you do your job in creating a positive experience for them, your visitors will willingly allow you to become a presence in their email inbox or their Facebook news feed all on their own.

3. One-size-fits-all framework

Today’s website visitors are accessing our sites on a wide ranging variety of devices with a myriad of different screen sizes, and yet, many sites are still built with the “desktop-only” mindset of years ago. This is a major strike for users on mobile devices who expect more from their experience than simply seeing the desktop site shrunk down to display on their small screen, with text that’s illegibly tiny and links that are nearly impossible to press. The Web is no longer a one-size-fits-all world. That being said, while one “size” may not fit all, you can still have one site that will work seamlessly on a wide variety of screen sizes and devices. By employing responsive design, you can build a singular jack-of-all-trades workhorse that dynamically reflows its layout based on the user’s screen size. The image below illustrates the difference between how desktop-only layout (i.e., the “do nothing” approach) is rendered on a phone’s browser versus a site that’s optimized for small screens with a responsive approach. Read more: Website Design for a Multi-Device World

4. Vexing video

Video can be a powerful way to convey information, but if that video fails, then your message is lost. There are a few ways that video can provide a stumbling block to engagement with your site visitors. First and foremost, not all video formats are compatible with all devices. For instance, Flash videos will not play on iPhones and iPads, which means that instead of seeing your excellent video content, every user on an iOS device will get a message that says something to the effect of “This video cannot be shown on your device.” Other visitors may not want to download a large video due to limited bandwidth or data download concerns, and as a result, your content is not able to achieve the effect you desire. In still other cases, your visitors may be able to download and view a video but may not be able to use audio – perhaps because they are in a public area, such as an office or store. Video without audio is fairly anti-climactic, so if the only way they can consume your message is by watching and listening, then you will leave these visitors cold. The moral of the story is this: If you are going to use embedded video on your site, make sure to choose a format that can be played on all devices and to reinforce its key message and content in other areas for visitors who may not want to watch or listen to a video.

5. The mystery of the disappearing navigation

Your website’s navigation structure is a critical component of the user experience, and the links it contains are the gateway to the information your visitors are seeking. For sites with lots of pages and a deep sitemap, a common design schema is to use drop-down menus that show subpages contained underneath the site’s top-level navigation choices. These drop-down menus are typically powered by Javascript. But what happens if the user has disabled Javascript in their browser or if that script fails to load for some reason? When this happens, your navigation menus may never be shown, leaving visitors stranded with no way to easily maneuver through your site. Failure to load a script is not the only way that navigation suddenly goes missing. Some sites with very elaborate navigation options for the desktop version eliminate the bulk of those options for mobile devices. This can create a dead-end for users who are familiar with the desktop version and are left searching aimlessly for links they will never find. Instead of eliminating links for smaller screens, find ways to present the same content in a way that’s better suited to the device’s display. Additionally, make sure that your site’s navigation has a fallback option should a script fail to load or something else unexpected happens.

6. Page is loading…

Today’s websites have become fat, bloated behemoths. Oversized images and animations, embedded videos and other features have contributed to the substantial size increases we have seen in webpages over the past few years. Bigger pages mean longer load times, which is a major turn-off for visitors who have no lack of other suitors vying for their time and attention online. Better website performance will yield better website results. By optimizing your site’s performance and ensuring that it loads quickly even for visitors with slower connection speeds, you can avoid showing users a half-loaded page and hoping that they will wait around to see the rest. More often than not, that’s a losing gamble, and the visitor you worked so hard to win will turn elsewhere to find a site that will perform according to their expectations.

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