Your website customer experience should equal your customer expectations

There’s a quote I love by Brandon Coleman Jr. that says: "Customer experience = customer expectation." And honestly, I think it’s one of the most overlooked ideas in small business web design.

Because when we talk about designing a great user journey, most people jump straight into mapping it out. What pages should we include? Where should the buttons go? Do we need a snazzy animation or a floating testimonial section?

But none of that matters if you don’t actually know what your customer expects from your website in the first place.

Your website customer experience will only feel "good" if it matches what your audience expected to find when they arrived. That’s the baseline. And then, ideally, you go one better. But if you miss that baseline entirely? That’s when the experience feels frustrating, confusing or forgettable.

Let’s break this down.

If you don’t know what your website visitors expect, how can you create a good customer experience?

Let’s say you land on Amazon’s homepage and instead of product listings, you're met with a fullscreen video, floating icons, slow parallax scrolling, and artsy animations.

You’d be like... what is this? Where do I find what I need? Where’s the search bar? It would feel completely wrong.

But now imagine landing on a website for a small, independent tour guide business. You want to get a feel for what the tour is like, see some amazing photos, maybe hear a few stories from past guests. If that website looked like Amazon (all rows and boxes and dropdowns) it wouldn’t give you the vibe you were hoping for.

That disconnect between user expectation and experience is what makes or breaks a website.

So... how do you find out what your website visitors expect?  

Before you map out your user journey, take a moment to map out your user's mindset. Here’s how I do this with clients:

1. Identify who’s actually landing on your website

Start with the basics. Who are your top 2–3 customer types?

• Are they DIY-ers who want to browse on their own?

• Are they people looking for 1:1 services who want to trust a person?

• Are they price-checking your services against someone they’ve already spoken to?

Each of these people is going to expect something different from your site. You can’t make smart design decisions until you know who you’re designing for.

2. Figure out what they came to do

This is the part people skip. We love to focus on what we want people to do. (Buy, book, enquire, sign up!)

But what does your user want?

• Are they here to check availability?

• Compare prices?

• Validate whether you’re legit?

• See if your style matches theirs?

Once you understand their task, your job is to make that task as friction-free as possible.

3. Look at what your competitors are doing. Then zoom in on why

You don’t need to copy them. But you do need to know what your customer is used to seeing.

If everyone in your industry lists pricing on their website and you don’t, that might cause confusion. If everyone else offers free consultations and you hide your contact form at the bottom of a Services page... you might lose the lead.

That said, this is also why I don’t believe in copying trends blindly. I see a lot of smaller businesses mimicking big brands, thinking it will make them look more professional. But the users who go to Amazon are not the same users who go to your local gift shop website. Their needs are different. So the experience should be too.

4. Use the "information vs emotion" test

I don't know if this is an official test name but let's roll with it. Some websites are purely functional. Others are all about the feeling. The key is knowing which one yours needs to be. Or how to balance both.

A client of mine who runs an antiques shop came to me with a beautifully minimalistic website. But the customer experience just didn’t land. There were barely any product photos, and no stories or context. It was too clean.

But her customers? They wanted to fall in love with an object. To see the details. To hear the history. So we redesigned the site to be more immersive: image-heavy, rich in storytelling, with space to explore. The bounce rate dropped and enquiries went up.

5. Don’t just meet expectations – exceed them

Once you know what your visitors are expecting, that becomes your baseline. But your goal is to exceed that.

If they expect to be able to see your services clearly, can you also give them a quiz to help them choose? If they expect to browse your gallery, can you show it in a way that makes them stop scrolling? If they expect to read testimonials, can you include a behind-the-scenes video or a quote carousel?

Delight comes from doing more than expected, not just meeting the bar, but lifting it.

Website customer experience is your customer expectation.

So before you map out your website structure, before you jump into design trends or inspiration boards, stop and ask: What does my customer actually want to do here? And what kind of experience are they expecting?

Because good websites aren’t one-size-fits-all. They’re one-size-fits-the-audience.

Want help mapping out your users' expectations so you can build a smarter, more strategic website? That’s what I do. Check out my Business Blueprint service and let’s chat about how to build a website customer experience that works because it’s exactly what your customers hoped to find.