These days, most content-managed websites are familiar with the concept of user-centric design. You don’t present your information in a way that mirrors your organisation; you focus on your audience’s requirements and how they can meet their goals on your website.
But how should you go about this design process? There are a bewildering array of techniques that fall under the general heading of usability.
At the most basic level, you can employ an expert. Someone with extensive experience of designing customer-focussed websites is going to be of a lot more value than a non-specialist. This is a quick way to get up and running.
To give the specialist some structure, you should provide heuristics about what you want your site to achieve. The expert can then analyse your site against these heuristics and tell you if it’s likely to meet your objectives.
This is still pretty subjective stuff, so the next step would be to develop persona: constructed character profiles which represent the kind of visitors you have on your site. You can then test your site’s objectives against these user profiles.
A more tangible way of doing this is to test the objectives against real people: recruit people from your user base and test their interaction with your site in a lab, or using a multivariate testing tool. There are many agencies which conduct this user testing, but it’s often difficult to get enough users to be truly representative sample.
Probably the most solid basis for user-centred design is to consider your website traffic analytics: click-throughs, bounce rates and page hot spots. This requires considerable investment in technology and analysis. These techniques all bring value, but with diminishing returns based on the effort and cost you need to commit.
Which one is right for you? The table below provides a very cursory guide.
| Type of website | Testing technique |
|---|---|
| Simple web presence where web is not a business channel Do these sites even exist anymore? |
Expert design |
| Brochureware: marketing-driven, but not the primary selling channel. | Heuristic evaluation |
| Large, content-driven news or information sites. | Persona development |
| Complex regulatory information or self-service intranet / extranet. | User testing |
| eCommerce / point-of-sale website. | Analytics-based |
All the techniques will provide you with some return on investment, but it’s only the more complex or commercially-driven content that’s likely to benefit from serious user testing or analytics.
Some further reading on usability and persona development:
- Amy Hillman – Pioneering a User Experience (UX) Process
- Steve Psomas – The Five Competencies of User Experience Design
- Daniel Ritzenthaler – Taking the Guesswork Out of Design
- Angela Quail – Beyond Fake Personas
- Andrea Wiggins – Building a Data-Backed Persona
- Jake Hird – Ten inexpensive tips to improve user experience