UX actions to do BEFORE you redesign your website - part 2

Here's the second part of my thoughts on the UX actions to consider before redesigning your website. Part 1 is available here.

4. Benchmark
So who in your competitive market is doing a better job of things than you online and who isn't? What does great look like for your digital customers and why? If you cannot answer these two questions, then you clearly haven't assessed the competition and understood what makes other sites better.
Action:
Review at least a handful of competitors websites to understand how they solve the same problems you have. Assess the features that make them easy to use (you might even want to look further afield at organisations that aren't necessarily in competition with you, but just have similar goals).
Note: For a small cost you can even point your usability tool at these competitive sites and give users the same tasks you give your own site.

5. Map out the customer journeys
Not all goals are the same on each site. Whether your aim is to generate leads or to directly convert users to buy a good or service, the path to acquisition can be difficult and dependant upon a huge number of factors. Action:
Map out the journey through your site for each of your key personas, ideally from initial awareness and acquisition through to them converting and beyond (e.g. into being a brand advocate). These functional flows will explain to you, your stakeholders, your developers and your testers what is happening to your users.
Note: Remember to include the situations when things don't go exactly according to plan.

6. Build your sitemap
It's not all about functionality, you also need to map out your content and the site's information architecture.
Action:
Draw up the hierarchy of your primary content pages and understand how each of your topics is delivered (if necessary for each device).

7. Wireframe the key templates
Producing a schematic or blueprint of every key page will create a visual guide of what your online users will experience. Wireframes will explain: the kinds of information displayed, the functions available, the priority of the information & functions, any display rules and effects of personalisation & other scenarios.
Action:
Create your wireframes based upon your customer journeys and the sitemap. But remember to test your creation before going into design.

  

Ecommerce and SEO advice : what to leave out

In my latest opinion piece for The Drum, called 'Search Engine Optimisation fundamentals for e-commerce sites', I have spent several hundred words explaining how ecommerce sites can use Search Engine Optimisation techniques to improve their organic rankings.

This is my 5th article in my online column about eCommerce and rather than it be a subjective piece, I wanted to produce a more factual article and dip into some technical elements too. However, in writing it there was quite a lot of SEO topics that I missed out, mainly because I wanted the article to be understood by the majority of The Drum's readers, who are more likely to be creative and marketing types rather than those at the sharp end of online site optimisation.

So what did I miss out? Well here's some things I didn't cover:

1. Webmaster tools insights that are relevant to online retailing

2. Micro formats, such as the star ratings for products that can then get fed into organic results

3. Canonical references and robots.txt techniques to reduce crawl bleed

4. Multiple sitemap.xml files for content, catalogue, etc

Was I wrong not to include these? I don't think so. Besides, it would then have meant I couldn't write this article :-)

SEO and eCommerce Merchandising

At Ideal Interface we have various clients who have eCommerce websites. Having done SEO work for them, including strategy and implementation consulting, I thought I'd post on some ways you can leverage your online trading site to benefit your company's search engine optimisation efforts.

1. Give you products the names that people are looking for
   If you want to target search users who are looking for a "red patent shoe", then calling your product "scarlet platform brogue" isn't going to help as much.
2. Provide decent product descriptions
   The supporting content you provide on the page will help the search engine spiders to understand your page better. Also try to include alternative words to target the long tail of search (Hint: you might want to mention "scarlet platform brogue" here, but again only if people will search for that term)
3. Ensure your site navigation (and therefore your directory structure) includes keywords and that these are replicated in your page titles and breadcrumbs.
   E.g. footwear > shoes > smart shoes > red patent shoe
4. Use of on-site search for keyword research
   Take a look at the terms that users type into your on-site search and you'll learn a lot about what they are looking for. Obviously these will be different to the terms that users type into the major search engines (e.g. they don't tend to search too often for your site name in on-site search, rather your brands or products) but they will be terms that real users type in expecting to find things.
   You'll also find out (if your search is clever enough) the terms that bring up no products. (Hint: this could either be highlighting a problem with the way you describe products or be an opportunity in the making).
5. Optimise your entire site to ensure spidering and indexing by search engines
   As well as making sure every page of your site is coded to standards and that you're taking full advantage of Semantic HTML, you should use tools such as the Google Webmaster services that are freely available. 
6. Create a dynamic sitemap.xml
   If your product catalogue is constantly changing, then I  recommend the use of a dynamic sitemap.xml file. This is a technical file that sits in the root directory of your site and tells the search engines all the indexable pages your have. A sitemap.xml file should be created each time your website product catalogue is created and will save you effort of manually updating it

Does anyone have any further suggestions?

Turn your site map upside down

We've been working with a client on redeveloping their website from its present incarnation. This current site has a homepage with an introduction animation and some navigation. This in-turn leads you to further pages (with even more under that).

Creating a site map of the pages you get a typical tree structure, with the homepage at the top and all the content on the lower 'branches'.

However, does this actually meet the needs of the orgainsation's (potential and existing) customers and search engines?

Customers want instant information about the organisation. They want to know some of the stuff on the lower levels and don't necessarily want to have to forrage for it through the navigation to find it.

Search engines also want content to spider and understand the site. The more this content is relevant and updated, the more likely the spiders are to return.

This therefore means exposing the content as quickly and effectively as possible and dispensing with conventional information hierarchy... or in other words turning your site map upside down! Content rightly therefore becomes the empowering factor.

When mentioning this to an Information Architect friend of mine he did questions whether this would necessarily work for all sites, especially those that have significant content and functionality.

However, is this not what the BBC news homepage and other such resources try to do?