Structural Defects

“It sometimes takes a third party, which is the role that we would play, to sort of take a fresh look and be a user advocate and say ‘If we put ourselves in the users’ shoes, they think about it differently,’” Eaton says.

Invisible Technology

Sometimes, a site’s user experience reflects the way the company has set up the back-end technology. “What I’m starting to notice is that sites are being driven by the way that the servers are set up or the technical [components],” Eaton says.

She offers an example: “Let’s say a large financial services company provides a Web site for their current clients.” A client might want to use the site to move money between accounts. But if the functionality for, say, the brokerage accounts and the saving accounts is completely separate on the back end, the user may experience the process as difficult or complicated, Eaton says.

Such divisions in functionality might have been the easiest or fastest solution for the technical staff, but forethought and careful use of resources could produce a better site. “In the best case scenario, [the back end] would be completely invisible to the user,” Eaton adds. “To be fair, sometimes it just isn’t possible to make a cohesive user experience. But usually, if there’s a good strategy behind it, the user experience can minimize, if not eliminate, the awareness of the technical separations.”

Get ’er Done

Silas encourages companies to begin the Web design process by deciding what they want to achieve with the site and how much money they hope to make from it. “I think once people start talking about that, it’s not a big leap for them to look at their site and say, ‘Yeah, this thing really probably needs some work,’” he says. “One of the other questions we ask people in the first meeting is, ‘How do you think your customers see you?’ And then, ‘How do you want them to see you?’”

Eaton thinks that the sites structured without the user in mind “really come out of habit or what’s easiest or what’s the first thing that comes to mind. But the most successful sites happen when the decision makers can break out of that paradigm and think truly from the user’s perspective.”