Concept Marketing Group Inc.

The more astonishing it is how Google messed it up as soon as you leave the homepage! What is shown on the results pages, is still acceptable, although you could enrich the user experience much more through additional filter options, previews etc. But let’s get on and try to dig deep into Google’s website and find out how far Google took the user centered design approach!

Ever changing (or even disappearing) navigation elements, constantly changing page layouts, giving no clue to users where to click next, … couldn’t be much worse from a user centered design perspective! And after neglecting all existing usability patterns, on some pages their only focus is the ‘sign me up’ button, not providing any information concerning a service without registering beforehand – is that user friendly? As I said, with that approach Google disregards almost every usability pattern for web design but it sadly seems that they can afford it!

They allocated 200% effort on the homepage, but very little on the other pages and the site’s overall structure, it seems. But the funny thing about the usability gap between homepage and all other pages is that a lot of companies still do the exact same thing! They test and optimize the homepage (and may be the checkout process) various times and with a more or less user centered design approach (okay, I think, they really focus on conversion, not on users), but forget everything that’s in the middle!

But since the smaller companies in this world do not have such a dominant market position with their websites, it is rather appropriate to close this gap between homepage and the rest of the site. User centered design can help! With thorough concept design (creating clickable wireframes and full specs prototypes) and an iterative design process, where you test and optimize the user centricity from the first prototype to the final delivery of code, you get the idea of what users really want.

User surveys and other studies have shown that even on hardcore shopping sites only roughly 25% of all visitors intend to buy something when visiting a site. Many visitors just come for (price) research or want to get a grip on what products are out there at all, some may even just want to know about the company history or return policy. It is nice when you can convince these people and trigger an impulse to buy something on your site, but this will not be the majority!

In other words with user centered design there is much more to win on the customer’s side than what you would get with just delivering the ‘sign me up’ button all the time. But why first start trying to find out what users really want when thousands of dollars are spent and the site has been launched? It saves you a lot of time and money getting it right from the beginning. Of course user centered design doesn’t replace A/B testing or other on site optimization to find out what drives conversions later on, but with user centered design you start much higher on the ladder than just with designing something ‘beautiful‘ or just focusing on the homepage - unless, of course, you have a standing like Google …