Thursday, November 01, 2007 Toral: Revisiting your website By Janette Toral Digital Filipino
WHEN planning to improve your website, you will need to revisit your purpose for putting up one so that your enhancement won’t just be for the sake of putting up new features or just to catch up with the times.
Here are some points to consider:
Purpose of the site. Why are you building one? Is it to attract new customers?
Reach out to potential investors? Attract applicants or personnel to your company? Having a clear understanding is important, especially if there are multiple stakeholders involved in deciding on its direction.
Target users. Often, the site is designed to meet the information needs of the owner or stakeholders rather than the prospective users of the website. You will also need to consider how users find you. It is too generic to assume that they will type your website address to get to your site. Note that nowadays, they will often find you through search engines, article or blog links and bookmark, among others. It is important that users will not feel lost if they end up entering your inside pages rather than the home page.
Content to be accessed. Once your target users are identified, finding out what information they will be looking for will heavily influence the design of the site. Design should also include proper organization so that the site can be easily found or reached.
Action or end results that you want to achieve. What do you want the users to do in the end? Is it to purchase a product or apply in your company? Does your current website give enough push for the users to do that?
Gathering this type of information is usually done through interviews.
However, what is ideal is for you to observe a user while navigating through your site. Interviews are often biased and the resource person may give response based on last recall or influenced by what they think you want to hear. In an observation scenario, you’ll be able to see the user’s behavior and ask what made him/her click a specific portion, problems he/she encountered in browsing, ease of use in finding the information needed, and how it can be made more helpful to him or her.
Surprisingly, when we try to highlight particular items in our website, some users don’t end up clicking on them or are reluctant about doing so as they mistook this for being an advertisement, instead of real content from the site itself. This usually happens when our highlighted content appears like an advertisement. However, we will not know this unless we test it.
Should you pick such an option, you can get, like, five user testers at a time and make calibrations from each result. This is useful when testing several website designs and you pick the one that will be most useful to your target users or clients.
There are many web sites and books that you can read for guidance. A favorite of mine is http://www.useit.com. “Designing Web Navigation,” (published by O’Reilly Media Inc.) by James Kalbach is another good read.
Kalbach’s book is very useful, especially when you are designing a huge site where there are a lot of considerations to be made, such as your navigation style, labeling, site architecture, layout, presentation and social tagging, among others. With so many new features on the web today, we can easily get lost on the things that we can do in our site for the sake of just having them. Kalbach’s book can help in keeping us objective and to base our decisions with the best interest of the user and owner in mind.
