Key Message From Webstock

Posted by Alan Cox in User Experience, on 24 February 2009. Two comments.

Webstock 2009, the five-day web conference held in Wellington finished last Friday afternoon with a series of heavyweight speakers including Tom Coates from Yahoo Brickhouse, internet critic Bruce Sterling and Damian Conway, known as the “mad scientist of Perl”.

The key message was this:

THE FUTURE OF WEB IS IN BETTER DESIGN

Couldn’t agree more. Here’s a summary of the 5 main recommendations from Conway:

  1. Help customers find you.
  2. Help customers quickly and easily find information on the site
  3. Help customers read the information
  4. Help customers understand the information
  5. Help your customers buy products from your site

Nothing inspirational here really is there? All seems rather obvious right? Well if it’s so easy, how come the vast majority of business websites get it so wrong?

Food for thought!

In today’s tough economic climate that we all face, perhaps we should rephrase the above key message as this:

THE FUTURE OF YOUR BUSINESS DEPENDS ON BETTER DESIGN

So what is meant by better design? Better design is customer focussed design and this means having a website that anticipates what your customer is trying to achieve and provides a great customer experience. This is what will set you apart from the competition.

To hear the Webstock speakers, wait a few days and the media files will be posted on the Webstock website.

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