Running market research with real customers is essential to good Web site design. You may know a lot about your customers, but it’s hard to predict how people view your brand, your messages, your product ideas, and their attitudes and impressions towards your Web site. Market research is also effective in ending those constant opinion wars in which members of the marketing and design team argue about what people like and don’t like. The best way to answer questions about your customers is to recruit some participants, run a quick study, and see what they say.

What kinds of mistakes are made on Web sites? The figure categorizes the problems by feature and implementation. The bottom left-hand quadrant of Figure 4.2 shows the wrong feature but the right implementation. For example, providing extremely sophisticated search features for power users is not very useful if most of your customers cannot even understand the basic search capabilities. Iterative design and market research will help you discover these types of problems.

For More Information

Fill in the following. A consulting services representative will contact you and answer any additional questions you might have.