Our website should be the number one salesman and there should be no insidious issues that lurk underneath the surface. These problems could kill our website’s ability to convert. Here are things that can indicate that a redesign is necessary:
- A lot of pop-ups and autoplay gimmicks: If our website immediately plays cheesy music and animation, we could risk alienating our visitors immediately. In fact, pop-ups, banners, animations, videos and audios are considered taboo in today’s website design standard. By forcing content upon them, we could insult the intelligence of our users. This could be comparable to having aggressive salesman who is ready to pounce us the moment we walk in the door.
- Less intuitive navigation: When evaluating the navigational structure of our website. We should release our subjectivity and try to scrutinize our website from the perspective of the most technologically averse and reluctant users. There are many different ways to reach specific pages on our website and we should make sure that they are all equally easy to navigate.
- Less than functional search feature: Visitors typically go to our website for specific requirement in mind. Many of them are performing comparison shopping, which can make them somewhat critical to our products. In this case, it is important to provide relevant information quickly. It is a bad idea to make them sift through different layers of navigation to uncover multiple pieces of information. A search feature should work in a more global level so visitors could bypass the various menu structure to find things that the need. It is important to make sure that the search result page provides highly accurate results that allow users to get what they want.
- Lack of compatibility with smaller displays: Today, many users are more reluctant to browse the web using the bulky laptop or desktop. Mobile devices already provide smooth online experience. In this case, we should pull our smartphone and type in our URL. There is a possibility that our website doesn’t work well on specific mobile platforms or browsers. It is important to make sure that we can view content effortlessly. The interface of our website should be clutter-free and clean. This will allow us to make a more optimal use of the available display real estate on smaller mobile devices, especially those with less than 5-inch display. Many mobile owners are concerned about the amount of data they use each day. If our website is heavy and takes time to load, then we may need to consider
- Non touch-friendly interface: The explosive growth of touch-driven devices, such as tablets and smartphones has increased the likelihood of people using touch interface to visit our website. In this case, we should make sure that our website has finger-friendly navigation. Menus, buttons and links should be big, obvious and bold. There should be some margin around them to allow a margin of error, if users miss the targeted touch area.