UX actions to do BEFORE you redesign your website - part 1

Before you dive into a full creative redesign of your next website project, here's six user experience tasks I recommend you carry out.

1. Understand who your customers are:
Some of the biggest mistakes I've seen on sites are when they assume who the customer is... without actually find out the trust and validating that assumption. I'm sure we've all seen or heard of the exec who comes along at the beginning of a new digital project and says "I know who our customer is, I don't need to research them" or something similar.
Action:
Dip into your site's analytic package and see if this provides any insight into who your current visitors are (just don't assume this will be the same going forwards or that the same type of visitors all convert in the same way).
Note: If this doesn't tell you much, then carry out whatever research you can (Alexa demographic figures, online survey, site registration details, etc.)

2. Create customer personas
Personas are simply a way of describing the attributes, qualities and required outcomes of your key customer types. I believe that the aim here is not to be too descriptive about who they are (e.g. what income they have or what car they drive) but to describe their online needs (e.g. what they specifically want from your website).
Action:
Jakob Neilson says that you only need to test with 5 users to get the best from your usability tests [link] and I also think the same is true of personas. In other words, I recommend creating more than a couple but don't create too many.

3. Review your current site(s)
"Our site is rubbish, I want something entirely new" said the business stakeholder to me on a recent website redesign project. To which I replied... "that rubbish site is currently making millions of £'s worth of revenue for you each year, it must be doing something right!"
Yes, sure sites can always be improved... but just to slate everything about the current one without actually know what is working well (and conversely what is not) is of vital importance to ensure that you do not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Action:
Carry out a set of user test on your website to see what users like & don't, plus where they incur obvious struggle in completing their goals.
Note: A few tests using a tool such as whatusersdo.com will highlight key user issues and also provide a permanent record of just how 'rubbish' your site is or isn't. 

The 5 steps to creating a successful Digital Strategy

Here’s my 5 steps to creating a successful Digital Strategy

1. Understand …

…. not only the commercial goals, but the stakeholders & team involved. Take time to then walk through the current digital requirements (priorities & dependencies) and all the relevant internal processes that you have to work within  (there will be some, even on a ‘green field’ project – or as I recently said to one senior marketer, who said there were no restrictions: “every green field has borders eventually”. 

2. Review …..

all existing projects, including any project interdependencies with the work done by other departments (e.g. IT),  current suppliers of online services (e.g. Digital Agencies) and make sure you know what KPI's (Key Performance Indicators) are reported against across the business. 

Note: You should also take the time to identify the immediate wins (e.g. is there something so obvious and easy that is can be done now?)

3. Document…

Key Deliverables. This means writing up what has to be done and when it is expected. Focus both on commercial optimisation (operational efficiency) and innovation to gain competitive advantage. Consider all digital touch-points, where possible adopting a user-centred approach and cover all lines of business, such as: B2C, B2B, Back office (e.g. purchasing).

4. Plan….

for success by creating a rolling 30 day plan that keeps delivering wins and fixes over the short and medium term. From this build up a longer-term roadmap that integrates functionality with marketing activity (content, campaigns, etc.). Where necessary develop robust justifications (business cases) for large pieces of work.

5. Future-proofing…

means considering all changes likely to occur over the roadmap timescales. I use the “STEP” acronym as a handy way to classify the different innovation drivers:

a.       Social (what will individuals and groups do differently?)

b.      Technological (what new software or devices are expected?)

c.       Economic (how will and increase/decrease in household income affect you plans?)

d.      Political (why legislation is due that could cause an impact to the organisation?)

 

When is a review not a review?

This was the subject of a discussion I had with a prospective client recently. It focused on insincere comments placed about individual products on websites, primarily ecommerce ones.
Surely the primary purpose of a product review is to allow someone to provide genuine feedback of ‘Product x’ so that it can help others to make a buying decision about it? Each review can be positive, negative or anywhere in between…. and displaying it not only shows a company’s transparency and honesty about its products, but can also inform the business of: customer satisfaction, longer-term usage, manufacturing quality and other useful information. (It can also have a secondary purpose of weighting product recommendations back to the reviewer in the future based upon their scoring – e.g. star rating).

It is not there (as examples) to:
1. insult the seller/owner/manufacturer
2. show off to others how extensive your collection or knowledge of ‘product x’ is
3. attack other reviewers of the product

However, there can be the rare occasion when providing an inaccurate view has its benefits:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Whole-World-Katie-Price-Peter/dp/B000JU8FXK/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1302169698&sr=8-3

Agile Digital Strategy - Part 6

This is the sixth (and final) part of a series of postings about Agile Digital Strategy. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4and Part 5 are already available.

So you've started down your road of agile digital strategy and you've progressed over time from point A to point B and then onto point C. As you will notice in the diagram below, the focus of your beam is now further apart than it once was and therefore there's the possibility of re-introducing 'dot com thinking'.


Its at this point you need to consider a review of your strategy and perhaps refocus to ensure your deliverables are on target for longer.


Now, there's obviously no hard and fast rule as to the period you should wait to do this, it will depend upon a number of factors, including:

• size of organisation
• pace of development
• appetite for refocusing
• your own business cycyle

And in fact the whole process of a review could take up valuable resources that could be delivering instead.

So I will leave that part up to you to decide when and who to involve.... good luck.

Apple iPad review

Its here..... well, almost in the USA anyway (the rest of us will have to wait until the end of the month apparently).

Here's one of the first decent reviews of Apple's iPad tablet:

PCMag: Apple iPad video review from PCMag.com Reviews on Vimeo.