When a company commissions a new website they often focus on trying to create a mirror of their organisational hierarchy on the web, or focus the site’s functionality around their business structure and business aims. Sounds logical, doesn’t it? Well, maybe – but it doesn’t mean that it is the right thing to do to make your site’s visitors happy…
Flipping it round
It’s time to stop thinking of your website as a tool for your business, and to start thinking of it as a tool for your users.
Your users don’t think like you do. 99% of the time they don’t care about how your business is organised or what your internal business goals are. Your users have specific needs, tasks they want to achieve, information they want to find. These needs are rarely well-catered for in a site that has been designed around internal business structures rather than by using user-centered design processes to ascertain what users are actually looking when they come to your site.
And it’s not just giving your users what they need – it’s also about how well your users can find the information they need when they arrive on the site, and how easily and fluidly they can achieve the tasks that they need to accomplish. Focussing your site around your users and making the experience of using it as smooth as possible will vastly increase the effectiveness of your product, service or message.
Getting inside your users’ heads
So how do you start planning an effective site that is based around the needs of your users, rather than the needs of your organisation? Well, the first step is to perform detailed user research; holding focus groups, informal interviews and getting people to fill out questionnaires can all help ascertain what the people who will actually be using your site need from it.
Even just the basic shift in thinking from ‘what do I need to put on this site?’ to putting yourself in the shoes of your visitors, and thinking what they will want to get from your site, is a basic first step.
Once you know what your users want, you need to figure out how to give it to them. That’s when information architecture and usability considerations come into account.
Information architecture comprises of techniques such as card sorting, wireframing and user-pathway visualisation (among many others) to help figure out how the information should be structured on your site, and how users will be able to browse, filter and interact with that information to help them find what they are looking for.
Usability studies will then help to refine each of the steps in the user’s interaction with the site, making sure that the experience that people get when they visit is fluid, frictionless and intuitive. Don’t make your users think – your site should not get in the way of them achieving the tasks they came there to achieve, and focusing on usability best practices and sticking to established conventions will help keep people coming back to your site.
It’s all about the mindset
The hardest step along the route of moving from the ‘organisational-centered design’ mentality to the ‘user-centered design’ mentality is the initial leap; in moving from an inside-out paradigm to an outside-in one. Once the concept that you should be designing for your users and not for your internal divisions has been accepted, the rest is easy. And your site’s users, be they customers, business partners, board members, stakeholders, will thank you for it.
So, design your site as a tool for your users; I assure you it will end up being a much better tool for your business than if you approached it from the opposite angle. It’s a funny old world, eh?