One of the best methods to improve your skills is use the Google Analytics method of evaluating before and after changes to your site. You should look into this type of evaluation, and you can be surprised to find that this will improve your customer response to your goals.
The idea is that you put up two pages simultaneously. You track the success of your goals based on incremental changes. The changes that result in more success are the ones you gravitate towards. Using this approach should help you understand what customers want or expect in order to reach the goal. (The goal is any achievable metric such as signing up for a free account or purchasing a product.)
Another method is to ask your customers and also observe your customers. Customers may think they want something, but when you observe them, you may learn otherwise. I have done this and learned quite a bit about the behavior of users.
You will also want to research trends and statistics if possible. People have researched design, and there are commonly accepted practices that can be used to enhance the performance of your site. However, you must be careful to stay up to date because these trends change as people 'fade out' commonly over used attention-getting solutions.
Patrick(patio11) released an opensource rails plugin to do the A/B testing. I haven't used it but he can probably chime in or you can look at his blog about his results.
The idea is that you put up two pages simultaneously. You track the success of your goals based on incremental changes. The changes that result in more success are the ones you gravitate towards. Using this approach should help you understand what customers want or expect in order to reach the goal. (The goal is any achievable metric such as signing up for a free account or purchasing a product.)
Another method is to ask your customers and also observe your customers. Customers may think they want something, but when you observe them, you may learn otherwise. I have done this and learned quite a bit about the behavior of users.
You will also want to research trends and statistics if possible. People have researched design, and there are commonly accepted practices that can be used to enhance the performance of your site. However, you must be careful to stay up to date because these trends change as people 'fade out' commonly over used attention-getting solutions.