The Web Fixers

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Has your site has grown too big, or is it growing too fast to manage? Is the information old, do the pages look outdated? Not getting any hits, or any referrals, or sales? Where do you start?

Step One: The Definition Phase

Effective information architecture starts with defining your site's goals and its target audience.

Do you want your audience to:

Read content?
Buy your product?
Look up information?
Register as a Member?
Use Your Links?

Define your goals in terms of specific user tasks, and prioritize your site goals sequentially, including the level of expected user expertise.

Interview users about their needs, wants, and concerns. If you already have a web site, try a survey form; if you don't have this kind of direct access to your users, find people who do. Sales people, account managers, call center staff - anyone who comes in direct contact with your users can help. Pay attention to their rants and raves and the terminology they use. For example, go to groups.google.com and do a search on your site's topic to see what users are discussing about your type of company.

Once you know your users, the next step is to define them. Don't fall into the trap of designing for the average user, because this will lead to a generic, compromised design. If I asked you to design a T-shirt for an average user, you might give me a white T-shirt that fits everyone, offends no one, but ends up being used as underwear. If I ask you to design a T-shirt for a skateboarder in Van Nuys, California, you now have a specific user in mind. You can now decide which color and graphics yield a design that will engage the set of target users.

Define these target end users. It helps you to keep specific users in mind while you design. Start by creating personas for each of the different types of people who use your site. For example, an insurance site may have personas representing heads of families, singles, and widowers. The more realistic your personas are, the more useful they are. Include demographics, interests, needs, and concerns. Once you've finished, select a target persona. The criterion for selecting the target persona is simple: pick the hardest users to please.

After you've selected/developed/created your target people, make those people the focal point of your design discussions. To forestall endless arguments over what the generic users want and need you should now make all decisions based on the specific users you've identified. This will help you and your team to be more focused and effective in making design decisions.

Step Two: Site Content and Functionality

The next step is to specify the content and functionality that will support your business and user goals. To do this, marry business and user goals with ideas for your proposed site content and functionality.

Try building a table to make this a visual process. For each Business Goal assign a User Goal that the Content and Functionality will support specific to each Scenario.

Business Goal:	Selling T-shirts	Increasing Sales
User Goal:	Looking Cool	Finding Cheap Clothes
Site Content:	Visuals -Music - marketing to the young -	Website Sale
Functionality:	interactive shopping cart	offer 1 free for every 3 they buy
Scenarios:	"Bob" likes the cool look, buys plenty	"Sally" likes a sale, intended to buy 1 shirt, buys more -

Step Three: Site Design

Your site design focus should be on the user tasks outlined in your scenarios. Start with tasks that support your highest priority business goals. After you've designed individual tasks, you can then focus on an overall structure that links everything together.

Create a sketch of what your screens will look like through a storyboard. A series of storyboards also illustrates the screen flow of a particular scenario. This will help answer the questions: What graphics will your users look for, what colors, what type face?

Now, you might be asking, "Why bother? Why can't I do mockups in PhotoShop or go straight to HTML?" But creating a storyboard helps you focus on how your site works and reads, not just on how it looks. Once you start using PhotoShop or HTML, it's easy to become distracted by the visual design and lose sight of the content and functionality that will drive your site's user experience.

Just remember....

This first step should be quick and easy to change. Don't over-designing them. Storyboards shouldn't look like designs. They aren't art - they should be plain, simple, and functional.

So it's finally time to design the overall architecture of your site.

Step Four: Site Structure

Once you've prepared the individual elements, you need a site structure that supports your ideal user experience.

Here's where you develop the Navigation Map.

Content - Text and Images.
Site Architecture.
Site Map.
Meta Information.

Remember your user study - put it to work again here...Once your structure is solidified, decide on labels for your sections and subsections. Labels should be simple, to the point, and make sense to your target users. Always keep in mind that your section labels should be there to help users find what they're looking for.

Step Five: Compilation and Testing

Now that you have all the elements in place for a successful site, the last step is putting the site together, coding it, then running quality control. This final step, quality control, includes testing the site using all the persona of your selected users, identifying whatever may have been missed in the previous steps.

Finally you're ready to load your site up on to the web, and enjoy its success.

If you find this process is just too confusing, give me a call at 603-880-6060 and we can walk through it - or maybe set up an appointment to talk it over.