Year 2 - Online Acquisition

Most of websites are designed by HIPOs, in fact that's a bit normal as the website reflect the image of the company. The only issue here is that HIPOs are probably the last persons who will use the website as a customer. It is really rare that they are eating their own dog food. As a result most of websites are providing a poor user experience. The other issue is that they tend to analyze what the competitions are doing and are highly focus on the design part in terms of lights and shiny experience without taking at all the end consumer needs.

In order to avoid this, the best thing you can do is to grab out there a study within your field of activity and list what are customer expectations. Once you have this list prioritize it according to where their expectations are the highest. Once done it will give you the priorities of things you need to develop for your website. Of course, some features will be crazy and probably never implemented before but this is where the innovation lies and there is always a way to make it cheaper. Note that it does not mean that you need to develop them all, some of them will take ages, but always think about what your customers want and always try to find shortcuts. Let's take an example, you are a restaurant website and you know that the expectations of your customers are about booking a table, though you don't have the technical skills to develop such feature for your website, well, what you can do is to look for this feature provided by a third party player, it will allow you to test it right away for your audience and if that works you will probably get additional revenues to invest it back for your own feature.