A colleague brought Donald Carson’s LinkedIn profile to our attention a week or so ago. It’s absolutely great, great stuff to consider when you’re thinking through how your website should be organized and what it should say.
In case you can’t read this on a small screen, his profile starts out this way:
My superpower is the ability to become the most clueless customer I can imagine.
Not exactly X-Men material.
But if I’m able to understand the least able, or busiest, or most distracted person, then the experience created from that understanding will be easier to use for more people.
Don’t mistake this for some P. T. Barnumesque “sucker born every minute” idea. It’s not that your audience is stupid; far from it.
It’s that you’re stupid – or at least destined to fail as a marketer – if you think you have their full attention for the full time they are interacting with your content, whether on your website, your social media posts, or anywhere else.
So be realistic about how your audience will engage with you and your marketing content. Know that you are not the center of their world. Grab their attention, give them something of value (whether information or entertainment), and encourage them to make the next move.
That’s the key to building a great user experience online and off.
