A couple weeks ago temperatures plummeted in my area and all I wanted was some comfort food that would hug me and give me warm thoughts. So I went to grab my slow cooker cookbook that I had picked up at the thrift store at the start of the Fall season to look up a creamy beef stroganoff recipe. I made it once and my family really enjoyed it.
I opened the book, flipped to the back, and reached for the Index. Except…some of the pages weren’t there. Two of them were torn out with the letters A through E. I knew right away who the culprit was. My little one. He’s so innocent and completely unaware of the inconvenience he had caused. However, I was still a little annoyed because I knew what it meant.
Finding the recipe was going to take a little longer.
So I stood there in my kitchen flipping through the pages hoping to recognize the recipe. Thank goodness it had pictures. I knew that the recipe was in the book, but without the index to guide me, I started to get a little frustrated because my user experience was ruined. The whole purpose of the Index is for it to tell me “You’re in the right place. Here’s how to find what you need.”
Now let me ask you this…
When someone lands on your website, do they immediately know where to go?
I thought to myself that if something this simple can feel frustrating, imagine how visitors feel because our website has no clear direction.
The Reality of First Impressions
If people don’t know where to start, they get frustrated quickly. And eventually leave.
Across industries, the average time spent on a single web page is about 54 seconds. Even more eye-opening? Our website has just 0.05 seconds to make an impression before a visitor even reads a word.
Mind blown.
User Experience Goes Beyond Our Website
And the user experience doesn’t even stop at our website. Think about our onboarding process, our project management process, our agreements and invoicing.
Do our clients know exactly what happens next or are they guessing?
Because that’s what great user experience is really about. Our clients and customers shouldn’t have to work to understand us. They’re already busy. Already overwhelmed, and already juggling too much. It should save time.
We’re all tired. And when something feels harder than it should, most of us just move on. Our customers do the same. They walk away because they didn’t feel guided.
But when our navigation and messages are clear, it becomes an experience people want to return to.
We don’t need to fix everything at once. We just need to find one place where we can make things less complicated. Like eliminating a step or two from our processes or simplifying our website.
Final Thoughts
I know that the recipe was always there in the cookbook. It was the path to finding it that was missing. And that’s exactly how people will experience our business. They will feel they are missing something, then confusion will turn into frustration…and that frustration turns into disengagement. People only care about how easy or hard it is to find what they need, and we should always aim to make their experience as seamless as possible.
Lighthouses have incredible boundaries. They don’t move for anyone.
Shamayne Brown is a virtual assistant and the founder of Camp Virtual Assistance.
She works with solo professionals and small business owners who are ready to invest in their business and need the support that she offers.
She specializes in creating email newsletters as well as other admin and creative design tasks.
Click here to connect on LinkedIn.
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