Perfect Your Website
10 user experience steps you can’t ignore
- By Tom Keathley
Many businesses have built websites that haven’t quite delivered upon the goals of the business. There are so many elements that influence the user experience, how can you possibly focus on so many moving pieces? If only there was a way to assure success and guarantee that the money spent in producing a website was spent efficiently. Even more importantly, did it deliver upon the wants and needs of our customers and prospects to a point where everyone was absolutely delighted with the final product? The approach outlined here, does this every time, without fail.
discovery informs—
Enlightenment starts here. Discovery informs your strategies and processes that come to life within your website. It assures that everyone is on the same page and it is very effective if it is designed appropriately for your organization. It is important to understand the types of personalities and mentality of your leadership teams. Design a discovery that they will respond to positively and will create aha moments. Many times it will involve lots of research, strategically crafted workshops, expertly designed surveys and interviews.
Discovery also gives everyone a voice. Leadership, colleagues, and decision makers will accept and support the final product if they have a say at the beginning. You want decision makers to be able to say, “I was part of the concept and strategy that delivered this website or digital initiative”. It doesn’t matter if their input is accepted or visualized, all that matters is that they were part of the discovery process, that they have been heard, and that they have contributed. This will avoid any pushback at launch and give you the best opportunity to guarantee internal success.
the perfect website—
We say perfect website because not all websites are equal. There are different levels of engagement for every digital initiative. The key is to invest appropriately according to your business’s needs. The user experience strategy model that we are going to review, can be used for every level of website build, from the simple site with few integrations to a high-end personalized, enterprise-level digital initiative. If you engage appropriately, with each of these 10 steps, you will end up designing and building an engaging, creative, personalized, relevant, contextual and yes, perfect website.
1 achieve your business goals
What are the business requirements? What are the KPI’s that will make this a success? Our goal is to determine straightforward success metrics along with aspirational goals. If you could attain any business goal, what would it be? It may be a goal that is out of reach, but let’s strive to accomplish it. It may need to be accomplished in phases, but stay focused on your business goals and take steps to accomplish each of them. Everyone will be pleasantly surprised that many times you can accomplish unattainable goals by focusing on your user experience.
2 identify your audiences’ mindset
Understanding your audience is always integral in any communication, specifically the perfect website. You can always start with secondary research, but many times primary research is necessary for this step. A deep and complete understanding of your audiences, including demographics, psychographics like wants, needs and desires can only be accomplished by primary research, segmentation and a creative approach to developing personas. Personas will give everyone the level of audience understanding necessary to relate to them on a personal and contextual level.
As you move from audience segmentation to journey mapping, you will begin to reveal what your audience is thinking, feeling and doing at every phase of their engagement with your brand. This will help you identify moments that matter. Moments where your audience is making decisions. Decisions that you can influence with marketing and thoughtful UX.
3 elevate your brand
This is the path to the right vibe and messaging. You can quickly get to an understanding of where your brand has been, where it currently stands and what it aspires to be in the future. That part is pretty easy for branding experts, but a sophisticated brand platform that differentiates your brand from your competitors is where your brand can become a game changer for your business and its bottom line. Make certain you have a documented grip on your mission, vision, values, differentiation, personality, tone, reasons to believe, product hierarchies, brand promises and how you message them. And don’t spin your wheels or waste budget accomplishing them.
4 information architecture
IA is typically a left-brain task that can seem daunting to some creatives. The organization and nomenclature of your content is the most important element to delivering the answers that your users are looking for. But it doesn’t have to be difficult. It can be very simple. Think about it as the thoughtful contriving of ontology, taxonomy and choreography in the service of utility and delight. Making the complex clear. Let’s deconstruct that mouthful.
Start with Ontology. How will you discover, define and articulate what you intend to communicate? Then move to taxonomy. You will need to develop systems and structures for what everything is called. Where everything is sorted. And the relationships between labels and categories. The last element to IA is choreography. The choreography of your content will require those unique thinkers that tap into both sides of their brains. The analytical left side and the creative right side is helpful as you create content that creatively encourages interaction with your brand. Your team will need to identify the content that fosters specific types of movements and interactions. You will try and anticipate your user interactions and build out content flows, making affordances for change over time. The development of the choreography on your content is fun, strategic and rewarding.
5 search and analytics
Search strategy and data analytics for your organization needs to be an ongoing initiative. Although, analytics setup and search research can be done in advance of IA, they both will benefit from being done concurrently and sharing information between multiple sessions. Most importantly, many search engines directly consider user-experience metrics in their search algorithms.
If your new site is a rebuild, understanding the current user journeys (which we will review later in this post) is very helpful in building a new experience. Find-ability, an understanding of search engine crawlers and providing answers to your users questions, will help you build high-converting pages. To simplify your search efforts, you will use analytics and strive to drive qualified users to your website and turn them into conversions or leads. First, you understand what they are searching for. What are their questions? Documenting their questions will help you deliver the relevant answers with unique and dynamic content in later phases. You will use your content, content strategy, and media plan to drive search associated with your website. A great search engine optimization plan will include elevating your link–building strategy and that will bleed into all future communication efforts like public relations. It makes PR efforts much easier because the message and content are already present on your website. It makes your company more attractive to customers, prospects and the press.
6 competitive analysis
You’re not competing against your competitors. I know this sounds counterintuitive but it is true. You are also competing with every brand that your audiences engage with. With every world-class website they visit. Because your users visit those sites, they expect and demand a certain level of experience from your site too. And delivering that is the best path for you to obtain their loyalty or conversions. It’s a value exchange. Your competitive analysis needs to evaluate your competitors but also leaders in other industries. World-class elite brands are spending lots of money on user experience, evaluate them too.
7 build your user journey
Your audience segmentation comes in handy when building your user journeys. What are they thinking, doing and feeling during awareness, education, and consideration? Where within their journey and engagement with your brand are they making decisions that you can influence with your content. Analyzing data will help you identify the steps they made along the path to conversion. Then focus on what content can you use to move them from one step of the journey to the next and continue providing content to help them to move them along this journey and ultimately convert.
A journey-mapping workshop with all decision makers always increases the likelihood of success when developing your user journey. Invite anyone who can ask the question “Why.” “Why would we do it that way, I would do it like this.” Then document the questions that your audiences are asking that you identified in the Search & Analytics phase. This will give you everything you need to brainstorm ideas for content you can create to answer those questions. This is where you will realize that you might need a better content strategy.
8 design best practice
Using an agency that pioneers design trends is best, but researching current trends, ADA compliance and design best practices will help your organization stay relevant longer. If you are not building with futurist, design-first thinkers, and a design thinking process, you are probably designing something that will be outdated quickly.
Start by providing examples to your teams of designs, features, components, micro-interactions, color combinations, graphics, animations, photography styles, and anything that would provide an elevated alignment to your user-experience strategies. If you can get them to shake their heads and say that they like these elements, you will know exactly what designs to produce for approval.
Using an agency that pioneers design trends is best, but researching current trends, ADA compliance and design best practices will help your organization stay relevant longer. If you are not building with futurist, design-first thinkers, and a design thinking process, you are probably designing something that will be outdated quickly.
Start by providing examples to your teams of designs, features, components, micro-interactions, color combinations, graphics, animations, photography styles, and anything that would provide an elevated alignment to your user-experience strategies. If you can get them to shake their heads and say that they like these elements, you will know exactly what designs to produce for approval.
9 wireframes
The blueprint to your website. You don’t build a house without blueprints, so please don’t attempt to design a website without complete alignment of content flows and functionality with all of your decision makers. Wireframes force your team to think about the experience without being influenced by beautiful colors and design. Wireframes allow you to test interactions before building, along with content placement, character count limits, and most importantly, help you visualize your story telling to create high converting pages.
Wireframes allow your entire team to align on all of your UX strategies before you design and build. Thus making the design and build phases easier and more efficient.
10 design brings it to life
A site that is ridiculously beautiful is helpful. A site that communicates your brand promises is imperative. But, damn, if you want a website that evokes emotions through color combinations and imagery, is differentiating and compelling, communicates your brand platform, relates to your audience, is contextual and converts at a high level, then follow these steps.
Clearly, with website design, there is more to what we see. Every element that takes form has a function. Although the design phase is sophisticated and demands a team of talented branding artists and creative strategists, the design phase is much easier when you have all the answers. The answers will be obvious when you follow these 10 user experience considerations.
