As all good businesses know, the most important thing you can do for business success is to understand what your customers want and need, and provide it for them.
A key element of this is to make sure your business website is easy to understand and interact with. A confusing site interface, with poorly-labelled navigation or clunky functionality, is the opposite of good customer service.
What does ‘site interface’ mean?
‘Site interface’ is another way of describing your website, with emphasis on that fact it’s an interactive experience for the user. It describes the components on the page that visitors can manipulate, for instance:
- move
- highlight
- resize
- click on to perform an action (eg to navigate from one page to another, to share via social media or to submit data)
What are the benefits for my business?
When you build your business website, there are a number of things you could be trying to achieve:
- to help customers can find out about your company and its products / services
- to answer frequently-asked questions
- to sell products online
- to engage with customers and build your relationship with them
- to reinforce your brand image
- to bolster your reputation in the industry
- to avoid losing business to more visible competitors
A user-friendly site interface supports all of these aims. For example, if it isn’t clear where to click to add a product to a shopping cart, or how to complete a transaction, customers are much more likely to abandon a purchase.
At the very least, they could contact you directly for instructions or to complain – increasing your customer service burden.
Accessibility is also a key consideration for a site interface. It’s important, for example, for users with vision problems to be able to resize a web page or change the colours to make it easier to view.
Disabling this during this build will make your interface almost unusable for these visitors.
The overall benefit of making your website user friendly, of course, is that the more pleasant it is to interact with your site, the better an impression the visitor gets of your business, and the more likely they are to become a customer of yours.
