It’s imperative to create a site with the end user always front-of-mind. Danny Bluestone, MD of Cyber-Duck, offers advice to help you get it right
The benefits of a customer-centric website cannot be underestimated: when something is designed with the end user in mind, the end user is more engaged, resulting in more conversions and greater loyalty. As more and more companies are making user experience (UX) a priority they are realising that user-centred design – a specific UX methodology – is a huge step in achieving positive results.
How to begin
Effective requirements gathering is absolutely critical. Many people know what they want from their website but fail to communicate that effectively, or do so verbally leaving things to get lost in translation.
The project should begin with a written brief. The brief can vary in detail and length, ranging from one page to several. It is typically written by the person responsible for commissioning the project or the project manager. The goal is to provide a document to a production team who can then respond with their own proposal that acknowledges requirements and specifies their timelines, resources and budgets.
Don’t specify every single feature and function, but do outline high-level objectives, what success looks like, key deliverables and user cases. Don’t worry about how to deliver the website’s objectives, as the agencies responding to the brief will do that and may have insightful suggestions. The brief instead needs to focus on who the website targets, what you want it to do, why users will respond in specific ways and when you need it.
Conduct interviews
Interviewing key project stakeholders is often the first port of call, once the requirements are agreed upon, as it helps to articulate the vision for the website and sanity checks the brief.
It is recommended to interview three to six stakeholders from across the board of the organisation, with questions tailored to the specific website and the stakeholder in question. Ideally, you should interview just one stakeholder at a time to discourage group thinking and gain truly valuable feedback, and ask tough questions even if it means scheduling a second session to follow up. If input is needed from individuals and stakeholders outside of the organisation, surveys or focus groups can be run to capture quantitative and/or qualitative data.
These interviews help the production team meet the key stakeholders, understand their objectives and manage their expectations by mitigating any unrealistic presumptions. The interviews also validate the initial brief while allowing the UX team to agree on key performance indicators (KPIs) for the website.
Use personas
It’s really useful to create three to four archetypical personas for a project. This helps to verify content required, define user cases, flows of control, and user journeys; all of which stimulate design thinking. That basically means thinking through how each persona will arrive at the website, what they will want to do there and what their thought processes may be at each stage.
Pick the personas carefully, using research to help you. They should act as archetypical users, merging different qualities of a variety of users, and be based on tangible empirical evidence of what people do on the website.
Each persona will get a ‘persona sheet’ and be given a name and photo. Other attributes such as socioeconomic background, technological capabilities and nationality should be assigned to the personas, as these influence their mind-set. The persona sheet should then focus on the user’s motivations for using the website and any concerns they might have about it. It is critical to verify the persona sheets by talking to real users who match their attributes. Failure to do so may result in incorrect assumptions being made with regards to the design.
Create a site map
The site map should be created at an early stage of the project. It captures the high-level information architecture and underlying taxonomy of the website.
Card sorting (where pages of the website are laid out on a wall using post-it notes) is one of the easiest and most interactive methods of creating site maps. It is quick, inexpensive and requires collaboration so all parties can understand the thought process that goes into sorting, prioritising and defining the hierarchy of information.
Conducting these card sorting exercises also helps to accelerate the content definition process. Content experts should be involved as they can best populate subsections and landing pages. Finally, the client should sign-off the site map so it can be used for the rest of the design process.
Test for usability
User-centred design creates an end product that fits both the requirements of the user and the objectives of the company. This is achieved by conducting usability testing early and often.
At every key stage of the design process, usability testing should be done with users from your target audience (ideally customers and prospects from your CRM). If no production-ready interface is yet available, early sketches and prototypes can be used. This way, the project, its features and content are sanity-checked and challenged by real users while being continually improved as a result of their feedback. Indeed, later rounds of testing often reveal more significant usability insights, which had been masked by surface-level issues at the start. The result is a website catered to what a user needs and not to what a committee demands.
