With the modern day mantra of “the customer is always right,” businesses rush to remedy any complaint from a customer, no questions asked. While customer service is a defining part of any business model, if you are receiving complaints from a customer about an aspect of your website that they are confused about, isn’t user friendly, or they see as not functioning correctly, it’s necessary to keep in mind one important variable – user error.

There are many steps that can be taken to remedy this situation. If you are comfortable asking your customers where they became confused or where it “stopped working,” you will receive some invaluable insight into the problem. Understanding how your users read and shop is vitally important to creating a user-friendly site.

If you are unable or not comfortable getting this feedback from your customers, then here are some steps you can take to improve usability:

• Add big buttons – Customers will often not read all of the text that you have carefully crafted and laid on the page instructing them what to do. Buttons on the other hand, are a clear visual aid showing how to continue and take the next steps.
• Add color – If an important piece of information is being lost in the page, it needs to be emphasized to that the user’s eye will be drawn to it. Adding color, background shading or bolding this area is a quick and effective way to distinguish important information.
• Test the layout of your website – Have a friend, family member, employee or someone who has not been on the site do a test. Ask them to go to your website and see how long it takes them to find a specific piece of information or go through a check out process. If they are not finding this information as quickly as you do, then you might need to consider changing the layout of some items on your site.

Customers come in all shapes, sizes and technical ability levels. If you have done everything you can to make your website as user-friendly as possible and are still having problems, then the errors might not be your fault. There are a variety of reasons why a customer may be missing a step – they could be rushing, or only reading half a word and jumping to conclusions as to what it says. The next time a customer calls with a complaint about your website, don’t immediately turn to blame yourself or your web developer – take a step back, evaluate the concern and consider the possibility that your customer may not be perfect even if they are “always right.”

This entry was posted on Friday, September 10th, 2010 at 2:42 pm and is filed under Blog, Web Design, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.