Despite how well your site fol­lows all of the com­mon tac­ti­cal UX design prin­ci­ples; if you don’t have the right UX strat­e­gy, your site will fail. Most every web­site I review suf­fers from a com­mon strate­gic fail­ure, they are designed to reflect the way each com­pa­ny sees itself, not the customer’s per­spec­tive – how the cus­tomer per­ceives the prob­lem they need to solve on that site.

I was recent­ly asked what I thought were the most com­mon web­site UX design mis­takes. Instead of describ­ing the typ­i­cal­ly pedes­tri­an design fail­ures, such as but­ton col­ors, call to action mes­sage, poor halo effects, etc., I offered a more strate­gic reply.

Some years ago, a well-respect­ed mutu­al fund invest­ment com­pa­ny that sounds a lot like Fan Guard Mutu­al funds, launched a web­site with autonomous sec­tions for each of their sep­a­rate busi­ness units. If a cus­tomer want­ed to review the diver­si­fied port­fo­lios for their retire­ment, col­lege fund, or vaca­tion home objec­tives, they had to vis­it each sep­a­rate sec­tion (mutu­al funds, stocks, mon­ey mar­ket, etc.), write down the val­ues of each of their hold­ings, deter­mine which hold­ing was for which objec­tive, add them all up and then try to deter­mine how well they were per­form­ing with respect to their goals.

They built their site based on their per­cep­tions of their busi­ness, a sep­a­rate site for each busi­ness unit. Cus­tomers mere­ly want­ed to see how well they were per­form­ing with respect to their invest­ment objec­tives, which con­tained a mix of hold­ings from each of the busi­ness units. Clear­ly, these two per­spec­tives were incom­pat­i­ble and the busi­ness suf­fered for it.

Reori­ent­ing the site around the cus­tomers’ needs result­ed in a sin­gle-page dash­board that dis­played how well each invest­ment objec­tive was per­form­ing, if it was going to meet their needs (i.e., retire by 62), and what they could do to get back on track. In a quick glance, users get all of the info they need­ed on one page with­out hav­ing to do any of the work.

Grant­ed, yours like­ly isn’t a finan­cial ser­vices site, but your site should still focus more on the cus­tomers’ per­cep­tion of their prob­lem rather than how you see your busi­ness, prod­ucts, or ser­vices.

Though it’s an over-used exam­ple, there are few sites that per­form as well as ProFlow­ers. The site design is ori­ent­ed around the cus­tomers’ per­cep­tion of their prob­lems, “What’s the right bou­quet for [insert customer’s occa­sion here]?”

ProFlow­ers orga­nizes bou­quets by the occa­sions they fit, not by the flow­ers in them. Users mere­ly need to select an occa­sion and then choose from a set of bou­quets appro­pri­ate for that occa­sion.

How does this com­pa­ny per­spec­tive prob­lem con­tin­ue to hap­pen? Because, most sites forego good user research.

Despite your most ardent belief to the con­trary, you don’t know your users or the prob­lems they are try­ing to solve. A good UX researcher will uncov­er the real user prob­lems; usu­al­ly prob­lems you or your com­peti­tors nev­er knew exist­ed. The first one to solve those prob­lems wins.

I’ve worked on close to 300 projects in my 25 years as a UX research and design con­sul­tant, and not one of those projects solved the right prob­lem. That’s a 100 per­cent fail­ure rate. Those com­pa­nies that reori­ent­ed their solu­tions to solve the rede­fined prob­lems, have dom­i­nat­ed their mar­kets. Those that eschewed that research stag­nat­ed or died.

Avoid­ing this com­mon design fail takes just a lit­tle extra effort:

• First (and often hard­est), accept the notion that you don’t know your users as well as you think.
• Sec­ond, con­duct real user research to iden­ti­fy their per­cep­tion of their prob­lems.
• Last­ly, redesign your site around those per­cep­tions – solve the user’s prob­lem for them.

As Steve Krug wrote, “Don’t Make Me Think.”

Is your web­site designed to solve the prob­lems your users are hav­ing?