Validate that customers’ needs are met and tasks are easy to do. Putting your solution in context for your customers and users, is a key to validating that the solution meets their needs and is easy to use. You need to work with people who fit the profile of your target customers and conduct design reviews to gather feedback. Develop prototypes to review concepts to ensure that your site meets customer and user needs.
Also validate where workflows and content for various customer segments overlap and differ. Think about the right experience to support the different market segments and users’ needs. Once you have validated that the site meets customer and user needs, you can then evaluate the tasks to ensure that they are easy to complete. It is a test of the ease of use of the solution and not the intelligence of your customers. If the tasks are hard or impossible to complete, then your solution is not easy to use.
This blog series is based on the article Beyond SEO: Driving Customer Attraction, Retention, and Top-Line Growth