What users want from your websites? Part 1

In today's world of cut-throat competition, the most basic question about any company and product is what user's want? It reminds of a Hollywood movie which had a similar title starring Mel Gibson. The crux of the movie was what Women want and how Mel Gibson attains the power to know what they want, which gives him an edge over people who are just whimsically making guesses on what their dream girl wants?


We can compare this situation to the situation of a company who wants to acquire new business, or sustain its old business. They have to constantly re-invent their product, be it an automobile, a desktop computer, laptop, iPod, iPhone, Wireless phones or any other and what they are trying to do is to make it make it more "User Friendly", "Customer Friendly" etc.


There should be something about these companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and their products which lures so many customers to their products and keep them glued, and in some way they become their fans and their own brand ambassadors. I remember the first time I used Google Search, back in 1998, and I have never used any other search after that. The difference was phenomenal between a Yahoo search and a Google search, the time it used to take to return the results and the quality of results, both were of superior quality. In fact, when I first accessed the page, I thought the results are coming from internal cache of my browser, but I was wrong. It was coming from the Google's famous search algorithm.


Same is true with products like Apple's iPod, iPhone and Microsoft too, which brought the computer to masses and made it so user friendly that anyone can start using one without much technical knowledge. I can see it, because even my technology afraid father can use it for his own small work. Its damn simple.


So why do we forget the same simple principles of user experience while designing our websites? The reason is simple; we think that we want to provide the user with everything which we know. So we try to make our website like a physical newspaper where the user can go to various pages and read every page one by one, or like a story book, where there are chapters and we expect users to go through each of them one by one consecutively, or may be randomly, but they are just chapters in the end. We just forget to use the power of computing when we create our websites. We forget that computer is more powerful and is an intelligent machine, and therefore we need not provide the barrage of information in one shot to a new customer looking for some particular information. I have hardly met anyone who just goes to a yahoo page to read everything which is on its home page, it just doesn’t make sense, compare it with Google, which just provides a clean interface, which lets you search what you want and not what they want you to show.

In my next few articles I will be discussing about some thumb rules which we should keep in mind while designing our websites, and which can really make the user glued to your website. Feel free to write your comments and suggestions if you agree or disagree with my views and opinions. These are my personal opinions and therefore may be a little biased in some sense sometimes.