The Design of Sites: Ch. 1 — Customer-Centered Web Design: More Than a Good Idea
Chapter 1 of The Design of Sites — the book’s introductory chapter, making the case for Customer-Centered Design before the rest of the book gets into specific principles, processes, and patterns.
License: © 2006 Pearson Education / New Riders — all rights reserved, no open license; one of the book’s co-authors is a FuguUX founder, which is the basis for citing it here.
Key points
- Frames the Web’s design history as four generations: “build it and they will come” (first), “advertise it and they will come” (second, the dot-com ad-spending era), customer-centered design (third, the book’s own contribution), and a fourth generation shaped by AJAX/Web 2.0/mobile, which raises both the ceiling and the difficulty of building good interfaces.
- Defines a customer-centered Web site as one that scores well on five factors: content, ease of use, performance, brand value/trustworthiness, and satisfaction — and explains the deliberate choice of customer over user (broader scope: administrators, partners, managers, not just end-users; and an implicit nod to taking the relationship more seriously than the term “user” suggests).
- Makes a business case with concrete numbers: an unnamed IBM redesign that simplified navigation and cut reliance on search/help, followed a week later by a 400% jump in online sales; and the authors’ own research finding that a 5% increase in customer satisfaction can produce a 25%+ increase in revenue, via two mechanisms (easier to find things → more repeat visits; fewer support contacts and returns → lower costs).
- Contrasts Customer-Centered Design against three competing approaches it explicitly argues against — company-centered, technology-centered, and designer-centered design — and against the related-but-narrower user-centered design it builds on; covered in Design-Centering Styles.
- Rebuts nine common objections to investing in customer-centered design (e.g. “good design is just common sense,” “experts only,” “we’ll fix the interface right before launch,” “it costs too much,” “guidelines are enough,” “QA covers this”); covered in Design-Centering Styles.
- Frames the rest of the book around three components — principles (Ch. 3–4: Know Your Customers, Iterative Design), processes (Ch. 5: Web Site Development Process), and patterns (the pattern groups A–M covered in later chapters) — and explains how they interact: principles guide trade-off decisions between process activities and between competing pattern-based solutions.