Digital Design

Why a customer centric Web site design is so important, yet so difficult to accomplish?

Customer-centric website design is critical for an online business as it is creating a website that meets the wants and needs of customers. An effective customer-centric design requires the creator to put herself in the customer's shoes and be empathetic to their situation to develop a site that is user-friendly, while providing all the information, when designing a site, if you believe its to hard to navigate and use so to will your customers. Customer-centric websites should be capable of providing a number of key business benefits such as:

Ease of Use

The site should be clearly organized, easy to navigate and not bog down the user with needless information that confuses.

Resolving Problems

A customer-centric website facilitates the process of problem resolution, which can be used to enhance the companies reputation. Think to yourself, what are frequently asked questions.

Generating Sales
A website designed with the needs and wants of your customers in mind serves as a type of silent salesperson for your products or services. 

Company Information

Some people may be reluctant to purchase products over the Internet, especially if they are not familiar with the company. A customer-centric site allows you to overcome customer apprehension by providing detailed information about the company. Details such as contact numbers are good should they be having trouble to use the problem resolution services.

Online "presence".

Presence is a big player in E-businesses. many sites have a greater presence online through a few factors. having multiple key words that someone is searching is one way to maximize this. another is to pay for the privilege of being the top search. Google maximizes this and the amount of times something has been searched (popularity) to refine its results.

Usable Doesn’t Have To Mean Ugly

We need to look at how the pages reacts to interaction. A site should be intuitive, useful, branded well as well as being functional and appealing in design. The design and way eBay operates seems to fit this. The Intuition of eBay is very good, the creation of an account allows the web designers to monitor your purchase history and make recommendation for your future purchases to entice you to purchase more product more often. It is appealing in design with many colors and it is set in such a way that allows for ease of use. eBay is well branded and has a good online presence, it is also functional with categorical search bar down the side and a specific search bar at the top of the page.

Go out give it a try, find a site that isn't user friendly.