Is your website listening?
Written by: Jonathan Briggs
September 27, 2004 [2398 views]
I ran this session this morning for the Christchurch Development Corporation to help a group of local entrepreneurs explore web design issues including usability, accessibility and search engine optimisation. The key message in the session focussed on designing to promote two-way communication with key audiences and stakeholders.
Objectives
• What makes a successful website?
• Designing for task orientation
• Improving two-way communication
• Conclusions
What makes a successful website?
Which of the following are designers currently using to focus their design decisions? Which create effective sites for their target audiences?
• Brand communication?
• Strong marketing messages?
• Welcome from the chairman?
• Return on investment?
• Product information?
• Ways to complain?
• High Google ranking?
• Last updated messages?
• Accessible by the partially sighted?
• Content management system?
How easily can you do these with your site?
When evaluating an existing site we might use the following checklist as a starting point.
• Talk to someone who works in sales
• Print a map of how to get to your offices
• Return a product or complain about a service
• Find your company on Google?
• Apply for a job?
• View the site on a mobile phone or using a screen reader?
• Get industry sector news?
• Compare products with competitors?
• Read customer comments?
• Respond to external events and seasons?
Designing for task orientation
We would recommend using the following as design principles:
• Set out clear measurable success criteria
• Understand your stakeholders
• Describe your audiences in detail
• Understand the tasks that they are trying to perform
• Look at everything from an audience perspective
• Stop trying to make one size fit all; create neighbourhoods
• Ask the audience
• Make the site searchable, findable, usable and accessible
• Create a clear sense of time and tempo
• Design processes for changing, responding and evaluation
Improving two-way communication
Consider adding many of the features below to encourage two-way communication.
• Contact us
• Feedback
• Commenting
• Polls
• Surveys
• Staff visibility
• Staff picks
• Corporate blogging
• Newsletters
• Customer service processes
Making your site searchable, findable, usable and accessible
Here are some of the issues that affect whether a site can be used easily to answer the needs of the audience:
• Content management – need an effective system and processes
• Separation of content and design using XHTML + CSS – emerging standards
• Design for multiple platforms (mobile, printing as well as different browsers)
• Conform to disability regulations (DDA in the UK)
• Understand Google (algorithm, titles, links)
• Perform user testing
• Site map
Conclusions
• Set targets
• Design around the identified audiences and for specific tasks
• Technology – use a powerful CMS
• Processes – set up the accompanying business/editorial processes
• Incremental improvement – recognise that the site will change
• Experimentation – learn from experiments
• Significant commitment – client needs to make a significant investment
What do you think?
