We all want to improve our Web sites, right? Unfortunately, customers don’t always want your site to improve. Your customer’s actual needs may differ from what you think they need. Like baseball fans who expect an umpire to start out perfect and improve with age, your customers want two opposing qualities from your Web site. That’s the Web Improvement Paradox.
First, customers expect your Web site to be like everyone else’s. The title of Steve Krug’s excellent book, Don’t Make Me Think
At the same time, your customers do want your Web site to keep improving. And you want your Web site to be better than your competitors’. But how can you make your site the same as the rest while being better at the same time?
You pick your spots.
Most of your site should be straightforward and unremarkable, in that customers “just know” what to do. If you think you have a better name for the link to your home page than “Home” (or you think you can improve on the words “Contact Us” or “About Us”), you can give it a try, but using the standard names is what customers expect. Doing what people expect usually makes your site easier to use, but you don’t have to make it look exactly the same. Just consider it a serving suggestion.
You can innovate in certain areas where it makes sense. To do so, you must listen to what your customers say and you must watch what they do. Every time you change one of the elements on your Web site, you should be consciously moving towards standardization (working the way the rest of the world does) or to innovation (a better mousetrap). When your site is different, but not better, that’s when customers get frustrated. Your job is to identify that situation and fix it.
As we marketers consider every element we can change on our Web sites, and consider changes we can make in our Web marketing, just remember that nothing works unless your customer understands it. You need to make sure that your Web site’s differences are truly improvements and not just differences. Marketers know better than anyone that a difference is a differentiator only if the customer cares about it. As the great automotive engineer Ferdinand Porsche once said, “Change is easy. Improvement is far more difficult.”
