What do you want your users to do?
It’s so simple, but so effective. It can help with every stage of digital development, from the earliest scoping to detailed design decisions.
Here's why it’s so important, and when it can help you.
The Why
Never forget: you want your users to
do something. It doesn’t matter if your website is a lead gen site and you want them to contact a sales rep, or an e-commerce site and you want them to buy something, or an educational site and you want them to call the helpline – all these goals are using your website so your users do something.
There are undeniably lots of nuances and complexities here whose importance should not be underestimated. But the heart of every single decision made with regards to your website should have the core goal of helping your users do whatever it is you want them to do.
When it can help: keeping up with the Joneses
A lot of companies have a ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ digital strategy. This works by looking at what your competitors are doing and copying wholesale in order to keep up-to-date with the latest and greatest. Coffee chains, for example, would look to Starbucks for digital ideas.
While this is a great place to start and competitor research is exceedingly useful, blindly following ignores The Question. Instead, decisions should be made like this:
- What do I want my users to do?
- This major competitor has similar users and wants them to do similar things. They decided that a responsive site and an app were the way to go.
- Does their strategy help me get my users to do what I want?
By adding The Question to your consideration of competitors, you can spend your precious digital dollars where they’re needed most.
When it can help: clear design
Great design is about knowing what to leave out as much as it is about knowing what to put in. A lot of companies run into the challenge of wanting to put all the information they have online. That way, no matter what users are looking for, they’ll find it on the website. The strategy usually manifests most severely on the homepage, which ends up with a little bit of everything.
While this is fine in theory, the problem is that the result is usually complicated and convoluted, and users don’t know where to find what they’re looking for or what they’re supposed to do.
Fortunately, there is a solution.
By asking The Question, you help reaffirm what the purpose of a website or a page in a website is for, and if something doesn’t help you get users to do whatever it is you want them to do, then cut it.
There is of course, one caveat.
Web design is a little more complicated than the one question (sadly). The second question should be ‘what does the user want to do’ and your website should be a combination of these two ideas. But that’s down the road, and involves
user testing, understanding different objectives and goals, who your users are, and a whole host of other things.
At the start of any project, your first question should be: what do I want people to do? If you keep this at the core of your project, then everything else will just fall into place.
