Make Websites About Your Users
An interesting conversation yesterday revolved around an organisation which is looking to rebrand and reposition itself in the market – a key artefact of this is a proposed new website. Interestingly enough they handed me a brief which included an inelegant mockup which someone had done earlier and a predetermined organisational heirarchy completed by the same source.
What’s wrong with that picture? I expect the warning light moves to orange when you see the about page has moved to a premiere position while functionality sits on a lower level to be accessed after various clicks-throughs (I’m guessing a drop down menu on a home page which supplies 4 overall links to the user). When asked about the users of the site the manager said the main users of the site were the administration staff of their organisation, and when accessibility was mentioned the reply was similarly ill-informed.
In the final lump sum of what a web solution is about you should be looking directly at the user. The primary user in this case was very unlikely to be the secretary. Potential users of the site would include: politicians and beurocrats looking to assess funding criteria, community groups and other interested parties, businesses which purchase the organisations products, various disabled people who work on the premises and manufacture their products, families of the people who care for their predominantly disabled workforce, people like me wanting to know where to find them. Across their various business arms the user might be several profiles or a meld of them. I’m just trying to stress a point because the list of users might be quite large – one needs to go out and discover who these users are, what they want and can achieve, and provide relevant content and functionality to improve both social and business processes via the new web interface. It can even be catastrophic to the success of the project to simply assume the user fits a simple preconceived internal bias such as ‘the secretary’.
Its quite natural for organisations in their own context, in their own silos, to look at a web solution and just remanufacture the brochure with a hyperlink structure. Its also natural for them to have an organisational viewpoint about the information they want to provide.
The answer, as always, is to research. If the budget allows, go and speak to these users. Make personas, write use-cases, give out questionnaires to the willing and unwilling alike as they walk out the door at the end of the day, make mood boards and sit in the boardroom or the warehouse with coloured markers discussing the site in rich pictures.
What you are looking for in the end is very rarely the perspective held by the organisational heirarchy, rather its an inversion of that perspective to focus on the functions and relationships that organisation supports. The web solution therefore should be a tool which supports these functions and relationships.
July 19th, 2007 at 2:52 am
Damnit – I was just about to write an article about how web designs need to be more ‘user-focused’…but I think your article is much better and more relevant, so I’ll hold back for now! Just pure coincidence!
I’m really with you on this topic – because it seems that a lot of sites on the web are still being developed without considering their users closely enough. I don’t strictly mean usability alone, no, I also mean that the site designers haven’t even spent much time researching the ‘people’ who use their sites and taking influence from them. You’ve expressed this soundly in the article and I hope more people read it too.
July 19th, 2007 at 5:05 am
Hi Matt – there are a lot of articles about this on the web but its good to keep pattering away at these core ideas. It comes up a lot with clients who walk in the door with an internal business focus on what they do – we want a site for us.
But really its the opposite, or should be – we want a site for our users so we can make more money and be more successful at what we do…
The first sign is usually the about page is at the top of the navigation heirarchy they put in front of you. Its really our job to persuade them that by focusing on the users they will have better business outcomes.
You should write your article Matt, different perspectives from the grass roots level are an important aspect of how we change some people’s focus. Sometimes its the 443rd article when the penny drops and they realise what we’re all going on about.
July 23rd, 2007 at 4:05 am
Good call – I should post an article on it! (I’ll link back to yours as a reference).