Survey Data on What Users Want

As you may have noticed, we’ve spent a lot of time in the past few months honing in on the most important thing about website design and development: Who your website’s users are and what they need. Back in January, I wrote our newsletter, Your Website is Not for You, on developing website personas, and more recently in April, I wrote The Website, the Webcam and the Test Plan on doing simple and exciting website usability testing. In between those articles, I also began a persona development process for our site, creating a list of interview candidates and then spending time speaking with each one over the phone to get feedback on their relationship with Newfangled and how they use our site. That was one of the most enlightening experiences I’ve had with our clients and colleagues in a very long time.

So, I was pleased when I got an email from Lauren Carlson, a CRM Analyst who has just done some market research on what software buyers want from vendor websites. She and her team surveyed over 400 recent buyers asking them questions about what kinds of website content is most helpful to them in the purchasing process. You can sift through the results of the survey in Lauren’s insightful article, What Software Buyers Want from a Vendor’s Website.

As you can imagine, specific pricing information was rated highly by Lauren’s respondents, both for market-level research as well as product-specific content. Lauren provides some helpful tips on how to present pricing—as well as other forms of content, like product demos—with an emphasis on keeping the content brief and to-the-point. Check out her article for more detail…