Here’s a thing that gets skipped over a lot. When people write about customer experience, they usually mean support tickets, chat scripts, maybe a loyalty program if the brand is fancy enough to have one. The website itself? Barely comes up. Which is weird, because that’s where most people meet the brand for the first time.<\/p>\n
Design isn’t decoration in that context. It’s the frame everything else sits inside. And the companies that seem to get this pair the site with the rest of their tooling, usually some kind of omnichannel CRM<\/a>, so a conversation that starts in a chat widget doesn’t die when the customer switches to email an hour later. The design has to actually make room for that handoff though. A lot don’t.<\/p>\n Anyway. Three things worth thinking about.<\/p>\n The Nielsen Norman Group has been writing about omnichannel customer journeys<\/a> for years, and one of their more repeated points is that consistency across channels matters more than polish within any single one. The site is usually where the journey anchors. If the top nav is a mess, or the search bar takes three clicks to find, people leave.<\/p>\n Not ideal.<\/p>\n Something a lot of small businesses do is buy a theme, launch the site, and never touch the menu structure again. Fine for a while. It stops being fine around the point where the product line has doubled and there’s still a single “Services” dropdown trying to hold it all.<\/p>\n This one’s less intuitive than it sounds. Designers get excited about hero images, scroll animations, whatever typography trend is having a moment. Meanwhile the thing the business actually sells is three folds down, behind a video that autoplays without asking. Arguably that’s more of a strategy problem than a design one. Though the two are pretty hard to pull apart in practice.<\/p>\nNavigation<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Visual Hierarchy (this one’s harder to fix)<\/strong><\/h2>\n