How Bad Design is Killing Your Sales

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There is a direct relationship between good UI design and increased sales. On the flip side, bad design inevitably hurts sales. Pretty obvious if you think about it, but why?

Quite simply, good user interface design is primarily about giving the user what the expect, where they expect it in a pleasing way. Doing this one thing wrong can destroy your sales on several fronts.

The first and most obvious way is due to angry customers who are not satisfied with the product. They will cause you no end of headache. Even if they don’t end up asking for their money back, they will cost you considerable time and money in tech support. And this tech support need will invariably lead to revisions, with their additional development costs.

The other major front is the loss of customers before they buy. So even if you don’t have a piece of software, bad UI design on your website can destroy your sales. Conversion in the web is soley a factor of good or bad design. Taking the time to understand your clients needs and expectations allows you to deliver on these, and thus have a happy customer. A web user becomes a customer only when they find what they are looking for, simple as that. Your goal in creating solid usability for a website is to try not to hide what they are looking for, without creating choice paralysis.

Managing your SEO work and your CPC , SEM and CPM campaigns to always deliver the user to a page that is optimized for what they expect, and making it obvious where they should go to act on what-ever it was that drew them to your site in the first place. If you run an advertisement that allows the user to download a free white-paper when they sign up for a newsletter, then make the sign-up the dominant element on the page.

Anything other than giving them exactly what they want is effectively chasing them away, more than likely never to return.

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Tags: Companies and Consultants, Conversion, Design, Human-Computer Interaction, marketing, online marketing, online sales, Search engine optimization, social media marketing, UI, Usability, User interface, User Interface Design, Website