I read this week that the Web is now 18 years old. It has gone through the awkwardness of adolescence and reached adulthood. However, there is a lot more maturing still to be done.

While most organisations these days have functional websites, it’s getting harder to wow us visitors. When was the last time you came across a site you couldn’t live without?

In my opinion, websites that people love focus on getting three things right. They are Customer-focussed, Design-led and Data-driven.

Customer-focussed

According to Forrester Research, 70% of US consumers research products online and then buy them offline. No real surprise there. However, people who do this are much less satisfied with their overall shopping experience. 82% of consumers who walk into a store, buy something and walk out are satisfied. This drops to 61% among consumers who started their shopping experience online before going to the store to buy. What’s going on here?

To create online experiences that people love, you have to create offline experiences that people love. Most of the time, the two are disconnected and inconsistent.

Most organisations aren’t focussed on the cross-channel customer experience. They don’t realise that to create a great online experience you need great customer-facing staff, a great call centre, a great back office. As the authors of Subject to Change put it, you should think of each customer-facing channel as an instrument in a symphony. Online is just one of the instruments.

Design-led
Design is more than just making things look pretty. As Bill Breen says “Design’s power runs far deeper than aesthetics…. If you are mapping out a sales strategy, or streamlining a manufacturing operation, or crafting a new system for innovating you are engaged in the practice of design.”

This “design thinking” can be a powerful differentiator. A study carried out by the UK Design Council showed that “design-embracing” companies outperformed their competitors on the FTSE index by an average of 10 per cent. (PDF)

Design thinkers don’t compete on technology or features, they compete on experience. As a result, they tend to have simpler product sets and business models. For example:

• Despite multi-billion dollar revenues, Apple only have about 30 major products. Contrast this with one New Zealand bank that has 93 different types of credit cards. One of the cards only has 8 customers!
• The Flip won 13% of the camcorder market in its first year by doing less. As the NY Times describes: “You turn it on, and it’s ready to start filming in two seconds. There are no menus, no settings, no video light, no optical viewfinder, no special effects, no headphone jack, no high definition, no lens cap, no memory card.” (link)
• At BankSimple they only provide customers with a single debit and credit card. Their secret is that there are actually multiple accounts tied to those cards, and behind the scenes BankSimple is constantly transferring your money so that you get the lowest fees and the best interest.

Similarly, many successful websites are simple websites. If you take a look through the gallery of sites at Go2Web20 you’ll notice that many Web2.0 companies have home pages with large buttons with a clear call to action. Compare Pinnacle Life with AA Life and you’ll see the contrast pretty strongly.

Customers love using these elegant, beautiful, simple sites. As Don Norman says, “In the everyday world, we want to get on with the important things in life, not spend our time in deep thought attempting to open a can of food or dial a telephone number.”

One final point on design – it’s OK to show some personality. Wufoo has a dinosaur next to the login box. It serves no purpose, other than delighting people (everyone knows dinosaurs are awesome). In fact the hotel industry even coined a term to describe aspects of a product or service that delight the customer, but which aren’t strictly required – they call them “delighters”. What can you do to delight your visitors? Have a pirate version like Facebook? Create a fairy like Air New Zealand did?

Data-driven
You’ve probably heard about dopamine. It’s the chemical that makes people seek food and sex. But what you might not know is that dopamine also makes us crave information.

So while people have been complaining about information overload for 2,500 years we can’t help ourselves. The web feeds our addiction with all these new possibilities to find it, collect data, label it, share it and remix it.

World-class companies understand this craving and help people to find, filter and understand the data. To stay ahead companies are going to need to hire a lot of statisticians, and designers who can transform the statistics into compelling, insightful infographics.

A really novel example of how to make data come alive can be found at Changing Habits, a UK-based site which is trying to get people to be more sustainable. At their website you start out with a normal looking guy as an avatar, and as you go through the process of filling out a form to describe your behaviour, the body parts distort relative to the environmental impact of certain activities. Each body part relates to an area of activity. Feet is transport. Bum is waste. If you are truly evil, your avatar ends up looking pretty strange.

To create online experiences that people love, I believe you should be Customer-focussed, Design-led and Data-driven. Do these three things and your website will move from the awkwardness of adolescence to the maturity of adulthood.

By Trent Mankelow, CEO Optimal Usability