Packaging Up Your Solution

– Contributed content –

(Startup Stock Photos, Pixabay)

4 April 2018. You could create the most amazing scientific discovery but unless that discovery is packaged in an attractive way that people find easy to understand and relevant to solving a particular problem they face – it’s never going to get the recognition or traction it deserves.

Today, the most powerful medium for any type of commercial practice is a website; and whether you’re selling an aluminum canopy to universities that creates a cost effective walkway shelter in order to keep their students dry from the rain, or are pitching t-cell cancer therapies to an investor – your website must show the problem you solve and why you are relevant to your target audience.

The other factor to consider, beyond relevance, is website speed.

There’s a direct correlation between the loading time of your website and the bounce rate of users; which is when people come to your site and leave straight away without engaging with the content.

To better explain ‘bounce rate’ think of a busy main street where there are many shops vying for your attention. You, like most customers will naturally browse a few different stores many times walking in and walking straight back out, because the store doesn’t capture your attention or interest in the merchandise.

Now, as the store owner, your job is to engage visitors so they spend a reasonable amount of time in your store; as the more time they spend in your store the greater the probability they’ll spend money, which is why big brands invest so much in visual merchandising.

Now, picture a frustrated store owner that has lots of customers walking in but then turning around and leaving straight away.  This means that while they would have high traffic, they have very low engagement, and therefore people simply aren’t buying anything.

In the digital world, this would translate as a high bounce rate.

Having a high bounce rate will cripple your online success, and while a high bounce rate can be attributed to other factors such as a lack of engaging content, lack of relevance, lack of a clear user benefit, or difficult navigation… it has been found that 40% of potential customers will leave your website if the site takes more than 3 seconds to load.

In an increasingly impatient world, particularly online ensuring an optimum load speed of your website is just as important as branding.

User experience (UX) design is however equally critical.  While it might not technically improve the speed of your website – it will increase the speed at which users navigate and understand how to find information.  This will lead to an improvement on a number of key metrics including engagement, bounce rate, and so on.

When developing a website it’s important to get as much feedback, from as many different people as possible; particularly with regard to the content architecture and whether they interact with the structure in the way you imagine them too.

Think about how people wander around grocery stores feeling frustrated as they search for items; in a bricks and mortar environment this can be a good strategy as it leads to new product discovery, but in the online world, having a confusing layout in which people get lost and can’t find what it is they’re looking for – this is a recipe for disengagement and disaster.

In summary, make sure you clearly define the problem your customer faces and the solution you provide to that problem in order to demonstrate relevance to your target audience; then design your website so that it’s easy to find what you’re looking for, and build it with loading speed in mind.

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