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Contented Management

Contented Management

Persona non grata

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:

Philippe Parker on | 13 May 2009 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

Basics of organising web content

There are a bewildering array of resources available on information architecture, user experience and interface design, so I just wanted to make a very quick post on how to approach the organisation of your web content.

  1. Identify key user types (personas)
  2. Identify key tasks they need to undertake (user journeys)
  3. Develop navigation to enable journeys (site maps)
  4. Develop user interface that will enable users to complete journeys (wire-frames)

Main advantages of doing things this way:

  • You’re not trying to fit in existing content unless it’s actually useful to your users.
  • You can identify content that’s missing easily.

There are more useful IA definitions at iaonesheeters.com

Philippe Parker on , , | 11 December 2008 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

Create a commercial persona

There’s a lot of stuff on the web about knowing your audience. It’s pretty obvious really: understand who the people are who visit your site, the kind of people who you want to attract to your site, and provide content and services to them in a way they understand. The process for doing this is well-documented too. You may already have developed a number of personae to represent your audience, but have you created a persona who will pay money to be associated with your site?

Your readership and advertisers may have surprisingly divergent requirements. Advertisers aren’t necessarily interested in your audience: they’re interested in your audience’s money and in their own reputation. We’ve all been to deeply unattractive sites with great content (this site may well be one of them) and we’re satisfied with the look and feel because we know our way around.

But when it comes to advertising your product on an ugly page, it’s a quite different proposition. You can attract loads of traffic to your site, but why would a prestige supplier want to promote their product on an ugly page? Advertisers are attracted by things that are new: rich media, web 2.0 functionality (whatever that may be), boxes with curved edges, regular font sizes in Helvetica… All right, that’s quite a cynical view, but it’s hard to sell space on a site that is visually unattractive.

So even if your audience are telling you that they like the simplicity of your pages, pause to think. If they’ll put up with ugly pages, they’ll put up with beautiful pages as long as the content is good. And if you have beautiful pages, you may even make some money out of your content.

Philippe Parker on | 20 December 2007 | Tweet this |