One of the many challenges of running a Website is attracting an audience that will stay loyal. It’s a jungle out there and there may be a dozen of Websites that offer similar content to yours. How can you differentiate yourself?

To build loyalty, you may want to engage users by including a community. Setting up social tools can be relatively easy but actually convincing your users to sign-up can be a challenge. There are a few hurdles that the typical user faces before deciding to adhere to a site. Most of these are related to poor user experience design. Understanding these common mistakes will give you insight on how to avoid them.

• Clear Website purpose
  Sometimes the purpose of a site just isn’t obvious. Most users will likely quit any website after a few seconds if they don’t understand its goal the first time around. It must be obvious in order to capture their interest. The challenge is to appeal to all types of users even the skeptical ones. They have to be able to understand what’s in it for them and what are the benefits of subscribing. Only then will users take a deeper look and consider signing up.

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We can’t stress enough the fact that design is about decision. Knowing which features to build is just as important as knowing which features not to build.

But, how do you know what your scope should be?

When helping a client define its design strategy, we like to use the following technique because it forces people to make decisions.

We haven’t invented the technique but have used it in various fields including business management, vacation planning, design, etc.

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Design is about decision. The decisions you make and the ones you don’t. For a lot of people, it’s very difficult to say no. They try to get around it by postponing the decision or using maybes.

Perhaps we don’t want to disappoint or create comotion. But, if you’re building anything, the reality is that you cannot base yourself on maybes. Leadership and clear-cut decisions are required. Maybes will not create consistency. Objective data, sound analysis and decision-making will.

After all, it’s best to have a bad decision applied consistently than a good one applied some of the times. Learning to say no is essential and, at least as important as saying yes.

A few weeks ago I watched the movie Who Killed the Electric Car? If you haven’t seen it, it’s about the EV1, an electric vehicle made, popularized and destroyed by GM in the beginning of the 1990s.One of the vehicle’s “flaws” was its limited driving range (roughly 100 miles per charge). Even tough the average American drives 35 miles a day, a lot of potential buyers were turned off by this limitation.

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At a glance

Earlier this week, Tsn.ca, a popular sports Website in Canada launched its newly redesigned Website. Overall, the Website structure is clearer and information is easier to find but, the overbearing use of upper cap text and shades of gray are questionable design decisions.

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