Is Your User Experience Degrading Your Brand?

We all know that today, online experiences have become a primary means of connecting for many companies, organizations and individuals. The rapid pace of development in browser technology and in web coding, scripting and programming languages has enabled us to offer incredibly rich, rewarding online experiences that were unthinkable even 5 years ago.

We, in turn, have made websites, web-based applications and networked appliances an essential part of our days. Think about how many online information resources and services you interacted with (and the number of devices you used to do so) on a daily basis just 5 years ago versus today and you likely get an appreciation for how profound the shift has been.

For many brands, particularly SaaS (Software as a Service) businesses, getting the online experience right is the difference between success and failure. For them, the user experience is their brand. It is the primary expression of who they are and it is responsible people's opinions of their brand. Online, well-designed user experience makes for a well-designed brand experience.

Particularly for web service-based business, there can be no detail too small to ignore. One big one that unfortunately is often missed however is how a company’s user experience changes based on the computer (or device) a person uses to visit a website, what browser (and which version) they use, and what plug-ins or technology they may have enabled or disabled.

This is where graceful degradation is so critical to the long-term health of an online brand. Graceful degradation on the web simply means being mindful of the user and the conditions and technical limitations in how they operate, and then designing the user experience to accommodate them. For example, if your business is reliant on javascript to provide in-page functionality, but someone visits it with javascript disabled, how will you accommodate them? Good user experience design takes questions like this into account.

Think of it this way: a sales rep talking to potential customers has the ability to adjust his or her pitch on the fly depending on the customer’s familiarity with the product or service, technical aptitude and his or her attitude toward the company. With a website, it's hard to impossible to gain insight into these details. And you also must be aware of the technical limitations of the user: their browser, OS, device, and how errors on the site are handled. Since you can’t just adjust your company website in real-time to match each user’s device and computer literacy, proper planning in advance can help you be prepared in advance for the most likely scenarios. By being mindful of how your users may experience your site, you will be far less likely to frustrate your visitors and cause them to think less of your website, and less of your brand.

This concept was highlighted for me recently while browsing MailChimp's website (MailChimp specializes in email marketing for businesses.). I forgot that I had javascript disabled in my browser while doing some client development. When I tried to subscribe to their newsletter, I was greeted with the following screen:

Here I am, a customer asking the equivalent of a MailChimp sales rep to stay in touch with me, and I’m effectively being turned away. Granted, javascript being disabled is an unusual scenario. But given that much of MailChimp’s target audience consists of web designers and developers (who in turn are valuable brand advocates that recommend their service to clients), it’s not impossible to imagine this happening.

MailChimp is generally fantastic about the user experience in their product (and we're fans), so I don't want to beat them up. But in this case, they not only missed an opportunity to connect with me outside of their website, they also raised the question for me if their product might do similarly fail for one of our clients if we recommended them. Given that their service—email distribution—is specifically used to cast the widest possible net to online users of every type and level of sophistication, this is not insignificant.

This may seem like nitpicking, but you can see how a small detail like allowing for a planned outcome (instead of an error page) for users who have javascript support disabled would have, in this case, helped a company connect with me long-term via their newsletter and reinforce that their web-based service cares deeply about how users interact with them.

As a business owner or web developer, it's important to ask yourself whether it's worth the time and money to tackle these issues. MailChimp may have assumed that due to their computer-literate audience that only a tiny percentage would ever get an error screen, and decided to pass on graceful workarounds for those edge cases. But, what if most of your customers are not web savvy, or use relatively old browsers? Worse yet, what if a breakdown occurs during the checkout process for your products or during the donation screen for your non-profit organization, frustrating your users?

Whether you’re creating a website or your mostly offline business, or more importantly, are operating a web-based SaaS business, planning for graceful degradation for target audiences should always be included in the project scope. It’s not only good for your brand, it’s also good for your bottom line.