How-to Tips #2: Customer Journey

The best website content would mean nothing if the web designs itself create a lousy browsing experience. Therefore, the flow of your website design is important. It is the experiential journey you are creating and leading the visitors/customers towards your call to action. We call this the customer journey.

A poor customer journey is usually shown in these two browsing experiences:

User experience

Slow website loading speed. According to Kissmetrics, 47% of web visitors expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds, and 40% will leave the website if the loading process takes more than 3 seconds. Therefore, your website should avoid this problem.
Wordy website. People will not spend time reading webpages full of text, hard-to-understand jargon and language, or thesis-like pages. Although you are showcasing the best product to the world, if it is poorly presented, you will likely disengage your visitors.

Navigation experience

Multiple menu choices. Have you visited a website that distracting? The landing page comes with many branches (menu choices). Eventually, you forget to come back or lose yourself along the way. So, a menu with many choices is a distraction. A good conversion-focused website should avoid this kind of navigation experience. If you need a menu, keep it less than five choices in the footer section.
Non-mobile responsive design. In the tech world today, people use mobile devices more than desktops/laptops to access information. A mobile responsive website automatically changes its layout to fit the screen size of the device used. If your website design is not mobile responsive, you will lose out to a large group of potential customers who leave your website for not being able to access your website information.

In a nutshell, a conversion-focused website is not just about content. Customer journey on browsing experience is important. When your visitors have an easy-to-follow customer journey with you, you make it easier to nudge them moving to your call to action. In the next lesson, we'll learn how to create a compelling and persuasive call to action. See you in the next lesson.