April 16, 2020

It’s Time to Think of Your Website as a Digital Product

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By Shaun Miller, Digital Strategy & UX Consultant at Codehouse

Digital experience agency Codehouse share their thoughts on why thinking of your website as a digital product will reap huge rewards, both internally and externally.

There’s been a dramatic shift in mindset over the past few years. A website is no longer just a website, but a digital product. It’s there to service, sell, and make your organisation money.

Some big brands have pivoted in this direction, changing team structures, reporting lines, and creating new jobs, as well as giving the website its own P&L. How many marketers would love that?! But there are many brands that still lag behind.

Thinking of your website as a digital product takes quite a change in thought process. Here are just a few things you could consider.

Design to solve customer problems

Oftentimes, websites are designed and built with company objectives in mind – what we want to sell, what we want to say, how we want to portray it all, the journey we want customers to go on.

A digital product flips this on its head. You need to make sure that you are solving real-world problems, and reducing the friction that customers – both internal and external – face on their online journeys to achieve their goals.

A digital product doesn’t exclusively need to focus on customer requirements – it can, and should, consider business needs – but the emphasis is helping to solve customer needs first and foremost.

Understanding your business in its entirety is an essential step of determining how to provide a sophisticated online solution to customers.

You can do this by holding internal and external discovery workshops in order to identify and define a number of customer personas, user journeys, business objectives, and goals. This will allow your team to firmly establish a unified understanding of the unique problems both the business and your customers are facing.

This upfront understanding will ensure that you design a digital experience that not only delights customers, but also – and more importantly – solves their problems.

Bring confidence to your brand

Organisations, proud of their brand and what it stands for, can often plaster their website with brand colours and brand language to the extent that it can be overpowering to look at and to read.

By pulling back on an over-reliance of brand colours and elements, and simplifying their use across your website, you can ensure that when brand elements are used, they are both effective and meaningful, and that web content – specifically imagery – is accentuated as part of the overall look and feel.

Bring real people to the fore within imagery, and give a human face to your company – visitors will be immediately left with a distinct impression of your brand that is transparent, trusted, and instantly recognisable.

Think about adding animation to your website. This works just as well for B2B brands as it does B2C. Animation provides context and delight, and can also support customers in navigating your website with ease, including on mobile devices.

In today’s digital-first world, it is vital that you have a website that is able to deliver the same high level of service and customer experience that your staff all around the world would deliver to customers on a daily basis face-to-face.

It’s time to think of your website as a digital product.


Written by

Shaun Miller,
Digital Strategy & UX Consultant at Codehouse