Using 10 years of design experience to help handmade businesses build websites into business assets.
The wrong energy can hurt your reputation
|
Meet Barry. (All names have been changed for privacy reasons.) Barry was the mascot for Serious Business. Serious Business helped smaller companies run their business. Barry was everywhere. He announced sales in emails, appeared on every page of the site, and was in a decent chunk of the printed catalog. Employees even had Barry-sonas. A lot of time, energy, money, and love was spent on making Barry happen. There was a problem, though: Barry was a jerk. Every time the customer encountered a problem, Barry was there to blame them. Found a broken link? Barry asked, “How did you break it?” Searched for something with zero results? Barry said, “You must have spelled it wrong. Try again!” Not awful in a vacuum, but if you’re already a frustrated customer, a chipper little cartoon mouthing off at you is only going to add to the anger. The Death by a Thousand Cuts was evident when you saw how many complaints mentioned Barry. Eventually, someone took a look at Barry’s impact. How many customers had he driven away in Serious Business’ effort to seem cool and hip? There’s no way to be 100% sure, but the damage was enough that Barry retired (to a farm upstate with all the other rejected mascots). Before falling in love with a concept, test it in a small way. If your customers love it too, you’ll know it. If they don’t, they you saved everyone a ton of frustration. I hope the cats are decent mascots. Have a great week, |
Ed, Cagebreakers Creative
Using 10 years of design experience to help handmade businesses build websites into business assets.
Internet customers have very little patience. If they don’t find what they’re looking for at first glance, they will leave. You can help yourself by putting yourself in your customer’s shoes. 1. Look at your analytics. Somewhere you should be able to see a list of the most popular sizes (mobile and desktop) people are using to look at your website. 2. Choose the most popular sizes and look at your site in that size. Note: You don’t really need precise sizes, but knowing most of your customers...
I went to Boston earlier this year and went on several tours. There was one in particular that stuck with me. The tour guide was endlessly knowledgeable, charming, and funny. His business was also new. I went to leave a review on his website and the link was broken. When I went to contact him, the contact form was also broken. Most people aren’t motivated enough to try again. Once they hit a single issue, most customers will leave. One easy way to prevent this is to test your own site. (It...
Last time we discussed 3 ways you can impact accessibility without touching code. Today, we'll go over 4 ways to write in more accessible ways. All of these elements combined help make your website clearer. Every bit of clarity helps your customers decide on your product over others. Use plain language Flowery and fun descriptors are great for a game. Using "Journal" to describe your customer's past purchases will make it harder for them to find information they might need to reorder. Basic...