How to get to know your visitors for a successful web design



by Maria Antonietta Perna


Think about your website as being your business’ spokesperson on the global market as well as a most effective business tool.  In other words, it has the double function of representing your business and working for it.  To design a website for success the basic principle is this: design around your visitors not around yourself.  This means: know them better so you can please them more.

The core task of good web design

Visual impact and creative layout and graphics are fine, but they are not the guiding principles when it comes to designing a website.  What we expect of a good designer is to achieve the following balancing act: reconciling what clients want their website to look like with meeting users’ expectations.  Achieving success in such a demanding task requires that both the web designer, who has the technical know-how, and the business owner, who is the expert when it comes to knowledge of her business and customers, communicate effectively and consistently.  The combination of the business owner’s goals and those of prospective website visitors will be the guiding principles in the web design and development process.  Here are three well-tested approaches to achieving your goal.

Ask the right questions and listen to your client

Until and unless a focussed conversation between business owner and web designer takes place, it’s next to impossible to know who the intended audience for the site is.  This is just the crucial piece of information the designer, or the information architect , needs as the ground on which to build the structure of the site.

Before having a meeting, I find that, if the client has the chance really to think through her website project beforehand, the meeting is usually more productive and the development process as a whole benefits from it.  A great way of facilitating this is to prepare a client worksheet.  This contains a list of questions to help the client  draw up in writing her vision for the website. The specific content of the questions depends a lot on the services offered by the designer, but the sample below covers the essential preliminary info to start working on the site:

1) Information about the company:

• company name;
• what the business does;
• main contacts for the project and their role in the company (e.g., who is the project manager?);
• suggested start and completion dates;
• allocated budget for the project.     

2) Main reasons to build the website:

• outline and ranking of business objectives;
• how the achievement of objectives is measured. 

3) Users:

• A portrait of the expected visitors to the site;
• current business customers’ perception of the company and of its product or service;
• possible reasons why those customers will want to use the website;
• what visitors are expected to do once they access the website;
• reasons for people to come back to the website;
• features the client would like for her website;
• how those features help meet both the client’s business goals and users’ expectations.

 

Having the client answer these fundamental questions will pave the way for a productive meeting with the designer where further questions can crop up.  For instance, you could ask:

• How many types of customers does your business have?
• How would you describe each category of customer?
• What are the barriers for each customer?
• What’s the most significant value this new website will add to your business?

Take out the creative actor in you: personas and scenarios

Drawing up profiles for each category of website visitor is a helpful technique that appropriately complements the conversations between designer and client.  This is where personas and scenarios come in. 

These are not new concepts in interactive technology.  In fact, you could say that they go back to Alan Cooper’s great book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum (Sams, 1999).  However, there’s still wide scope for their implementation and further study.  Kim Goodwin, an interactive products expert, explains the concept of personas as follows:

“A persona is a user archetype … By designing for the archetype—whose goals and behavior patterns are well understood—you can satisfy the broader group of people represented by that archetype.  In most cases, personas are synthesized from a series of ethnographic interviews with real people, then captured in 1-2 page descriptions that include behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and environment, with a few fictional personal details to bring the persona to life. For each product, or sometimes for each set of tools within a product, there is a small set of personas, one of whom is the primary focus for the design.”

Personas move within a concrete context, that is, the scenario.  For instance, for an e-commerce site, the scenario could be the website visitor’s journey from searching the product catalog to successfully reaching the check-out stage.  Here are some of Kim Goodwin’s great tips to draw up effective personas and scenarios:

• To be effective, personas need to be based on sound field research, not derived from the functionality you've already decided to build
• Personas should incorporate attitudes and experience goals when that's useful, but are first and foremost about behavior and end goals
• Keep personas and scenarios distinct. The term "personas" is derived from the Latin dramatis personae, the cast of characters in a play. A set of characters is only interesting in the context of a plot, which is why we use scenarios. Personas should focus on current behavior, not speculation about future behavior with a product. Scenarios describe the personas' future behavior, first in an idealized and high-level fashion, and later in a somewhat more pragmatic and detailed way.

Conclusion

Planning an effective website that works for the success of a business involves a number of inter-related tasks and techniques that have one fundamental factor at their core: the user.  But isn’t this the rule of every successful business?  I have outlined three approaches to user-centered design, i.e., client worksheet, client-designer meeting, and personas/scenarios research.  The era of social media provides the designer with one more fantastic tool to gain knowledge of website visitors, but this will be the topic of my next article.  What methods do you use to know your customers?