Help Users Accomplish What They Came For

The key to improving the website experience is not the technical level, but the focus on achieving user goals. After browsing many websites, I found that the biggest problem is that many websites fail to effectively help users complete their target tasks. Neither availability, information architecture or performance, it is a core issue. Over the years, advances in browser functionality and technology stacks have made websites increasingly complex. This is true for product display pages, booking services, portfolios and online stores. We often pursue the "surprise" of user experience, but ignore the core goal: assisting users in achieving their access purpose.

Therefore, the key to improving the website experience is to clarify the most important actions that users need to complete on the page and make it as simple as possible.

All visual effects, beautiful graphics, cool interactions and tracking scripts are next.

I took my own experience as an example: A few years ago, I was on vacation in a remote area with extremely poor network conditions, and my luggage was lost and it was difficult to buy clothes or cosmetics. Since the airline website cannot load under a limited network environment, I cannot check the luggage location and delivery time, and I cannot even find a phone number to dial, and the email address found from elsewhere has expired. The website does not follow the principles of progressive enhancement and elegant downgrade, allowing only well-connected users to download a large amount of JavaScript code to build a complete experience. A simple form, which contains two text input boxes and basic text information as an alternative, can easily solve my problem. Developers may spend countless hours creating a pleasant experience, but I can’t.

We can easily be pulled by project milestones and become addicted to tasks in Jira or other project management software. We tend to reuse familiar solutions to copy and paste the code from previous projects or Stack Overflow. We also tend to assume that "running well on my machine" means it works for everyone.

The difficulty is to break out of the mindset of new features that increase project value and focus on the application parts that may be overlooked. Keeping up with new features and browser API releases is difficult. It is also difficult to put yourself in the shoes of users who may not have the same privileges as us.

Please rethink the true value of the website to users and try to look at the page from a completely new perspective.

Since we are used to solutions we build ourselves, this can be challenging. It’s hard to imagine users not being able to follow the instructions or clues we leave on the screen, or how visually impaired users or users who can only navigate with keyboards will experience the page. We forgot to test edge cases and anything beyond the user's "ideal path" and ignore the fact that we are using a strong MacBook, a clear display and a stable network connection. We forget that some people are not native English speakers and think that words that are self-evident to us are meaningless to users who do not use the word frequently.

I challenge you to take the time to review your website like you did for the first time.

Use it in a production environment, including third-party resource streams that may not exist in development mode. Use it when the network connection is very poor and measure the time it takes to complete a simple task, such as filling out a form. Try using different devices you may have never used before.

I challenge you to find real users of your website and take the time to observe how they use the content you build during the user testing session.

You may have some assumptions about which factors will cause headaches for users and which factors will not have an impact. I'm sure some of these assumptions will be challenged and you end up creating a complete list of things that you wouldn't have considered otherwise.

I hope that progressive enhancement won't become another buzzword and that you really take the time to help users achieve their goals. If you are interested in learning more about this topic, I can recommend you to be familiar with Jeremy Keith’s presentation on this topic or Aaron Gustafson’s article, which makes this idea widely known.

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