Let’s be honest here, your opinion doesn’t matter. I know you don’t like hearing it, but if you want to make money and be successful it doesn’t. Your opinion is wrapped up in a layer of personal filters, biases, and plain egotistical perceptions that are usually wrong.
Who is right? Your paying customers are right.
For example, let’s look at the way websites would be built if only one type of person was involved in the process.
If a designer were building the website it would be built beautifully with all kinds of flashy buttons and beautiful forms and utterly no way to actually buy anything.
If a developer were to build it, it would be full of back-end functionality and databases and would be ridiculously fast and you’d have to navigate the site with hand-typed commands.
If a marketer were in control, the site would be conversion-oriented and full of tracking code to grab metrics and everything would be about the sale and absolutely nothing else.
Now, none of these methods is wrong in their own way. You need a site to be beautiful to draw the customer in, and you need back-end functionality and speed so that they can order, and you need data about your site. This is why we have designers, developers, and marketers all involved in the website process, each with their own individual talents.
The problem comes in when you realize that the typical customer is neither a designer, marketer, nor developer and they just want to buy a product or learn something new. In their language, at their pace, with their needs in mind.
That’s why you need to realize that you’re wrong about most things. You need to talk to your customers, think like your customers, and throw your pre-conceived notions and perceptions out the window entirely. Otherwise you’ll end up with a website that no one comes to or can understand or a store front that no one buys from or a service that no one really wants.
So, bring your customers in on the process. Involve them in the build, pass ideas by them, and make them feel like they own the process. You’ll end up with a super-loyal tribe of customers selling a product that people actually want where and when they want it. That’s the unicorn of business, and yet it’s so easy to catch.