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Jeff MalingChief Experience OfficerRoundarch |
Many organizations are looking to redesign their Web sites in 2010. For a lot of these organizations, their sites have gone from supplementary to primary during the period since their last redesign. Any redesign project, therefore, takes on more strategic importance than ever—with more visibility from the CEO on down. Whether your organization is contemplating a redesign of its customer-facing site or even its intranet, it is important to keep in mind the following:
1. Be Realistic About Budget: Most site redesigns for organizations of $1 billion or more can cost $1 million to $2 million and go up quickly from there. And this is for a single application or single site, not for a collection of sites. If you can’t commit to this, you are better off focusing on redoing a single part of the site and doing it well, rather than spreading what money you do have across the entire site. Many companies with limited funds opt for a “reskin”—a new creative feel but with little underlying change. With some exceptions, reskins make everyone feel better, but they seldom result in bottom-line impact. In should also be noted that, in addition to the upfront costs, organizations need to budget 30% to 70% of the upfront costs for yearly updates.
2. Personas And Primary Research: Forrester Research is a big proponent of primary research and the development of personas, or archetypes, to represent user types. We are, too. But you need to calibrate the amount of time spent on this in terms of your overall budget. You also need to leverage personas and not just use them to develop the design. You should return and adjust them every time you get new data on users, including site traffic, usability testing, etc. And you must also include everything users do online related to the process you are managing (e.g., buying a cell phone), from the use of blogs and Twitter and others sites to physical locations and stores.
3. Move Beyond Home Page Design To Conceptual Design: Almost every company spends way too much time focusing on its home page to the detriment of all other pages. At the end of the day, the home page can contain only so much information and, what’s worse, it often becomes a political football. On most of our projects, we recommend an extended conceptual design phase in which one or more site concepts are fully fleshed out, including the home page, navigation, and other key pages or views. Until you can see how the main aspects of the site come together, the home page argument lacks context. We often test these concepts with users and review with stakeholders. Once we get consensus, we then dive into the detail of making the design work.
4. Go Rich Or Stay Home: If you are designing a site in 2010 and not taking advantage of rich technologies such as Ajax, Silverlight, Flash, or Flex, then you should really rethink your strategy. Rich technologies are not only sexy, but they truly help usability when deployed properly. In every user study we have done, rich sites help the user maintain the context of what he or she is doing. Think about it: Would Amazon have designed the original 12-step checkout process if rich technologies existed when it started? No. It would have had someone quickly drag an item into a shopping chart and keep shopping. There is a religious war about Flash versus Ajax versus Silverlight that I will leave for another day. But don’t let people tell you that you can’t use Flash because not enough people have the Flash player—it is on 98% of browsers worldwide. There might be other reasons to use Ajax instead of Flash, but this should not be one of them.
