Contemporary information management offers this sage advice

Redesigning Your Corporate Site

Among the many variables in how to approach renovating existing business or customer facing websites, there are three top level considerations:
1. Information
2. Functionality
3. Look and Feel

What you sell drives your website’s look and feel. What your customers need to do on your website or with their information drives your site’s functionality. Because you sell entertainment and communication your site can be as lively, vigorous, and exciting as wished, as long as it presents the information your customers seek, in a way that is easy to find. It can even be said that

“Beauty Communicates.” “Good design adds value faster than it adds cost.”

“The Motorola RAZR is now selling at a rate of about four million units each month -- 1.5 per second. If Motorola spends another $million or two improving the design, they can make it back in a day.”

Your competitors are companies such as Comcast and ATT. In particular ATT is doing a great job communicating with their customer base in an organized and friendly way. They have probably performed a great deal of research around the look and feel, and it only makes sense to adapt what they learned where it is appropriate to your firm.

First let’s talk about how to make decisions, how to make sure they are the right ones. Then find out what some experts advice, and do a walk through your site to contrast and compare to ATT’s website, and gather relevant ideas along the way.
Customers and Business Intelligence
The most important place to begin is with the customer, and discovering what they need or want through a Business Intelligence process.

Business Intelligence’s goals are three main items -
• Making better decisions faster
• Converting data into information
• Using a rational approach to management

Business Intelligence advises us to make business decisions based on well-informed logic -- that will meet or exceed our goals. Many goals even when realized do not immediately make money, but they generally point in that direction, or are goals which uncover ways to help earn money or satisfy our customers. In the case of a website redesign, the governing discipline of user interface, application design, and related decision making is Information Management.

Measurement

You may also want to verify that the decisions made have a good return on investment by measuring them. The metrics of business intelligence which are useful and relevant to a decision, called key performance indicators (KPIs) are those things from which we may determine return on investment (ROI). On the Web this is related to Web analytics and conversion, which means the tracking data and relationship to customers buying your products or services. These are most interesting because they can be traced, and iteratively over time, improved.

“Key Performance Indicators” and “Return On Investment” are fancy phrases for how you know you are right. Measurement is what keeps the iterative practices pointed in the right directions.

Information Management

Contemporary information management offers this sage advice –
Every single decision about the strategy, content, and presentation of information on business websites (portals, intranet, and extranet sites) needs to be driven from a stated business goal. (Ironic - sounds just like Business Intelligence, doesn’t it?)

It is not possible to collect and evaluate all the relevant information required to make solid decisions at a reasonable price (time/effort), therefore reasonable inquiries, of the stakeholders, of the business goals, and of the end users needs are needed to create the strategies which most align with those business goals and objectives.

So how is this achieved? The process begins by collecting business objectives from the different stakeholders, including the primary actual end users of the information on these sites. Business goals and users end goals may not be exactly the same, or may even appear diametrically opposed, e.g.:
Users Goals
Business • Make Money
Add customers
Retain customers
Reduce support costs
Customer • Save Money
Get lots of usable stuff
Have Fun
Get information now
But the information collected can be used in a discovery process which shows us how to please both parties.

A fundamental information management design statement is

“Know your user ... and you are not your user.”

That last part is most important to designers and decision makers who may believe that they know what their end users want without asking them.

"You are not your end user."

The intention of such a whimsical and obvious fact is to help drive home the point that businesses must discover who their end users, that is, their customers are; what are their demographics: ages, genders, locations, etc? What are their wants, needs, limitations, communities? What are their languages, technical skill levels, attention span, interest level, and so forth?

For example, how many of your end users encounter accessibility issues online? Any of these things may be turned into a business advantage:

"Enabling accessible technology is a growth opportunity, it meets customer needs, and it's the right thing to do … As the Baby Boom generation ages, more and more people will face the challenges of reduced dexterity, vision, and hearing. So enabling accessible technology is a growth opportunity... “ Steve Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft), 2001, Businessweek.com

You may inquire about your users in a variety of ways, but all of them include asking the customer for input or feedback, some even without them knowing.
• Amazon.com conducts a form of choice modeling , called A/B testing live on its site – does the user chose A or B?, which one the end user actually selects drives how the information about the product is presented. They have a large in-house UI design team.

• Premera.com (Blue Cross + Blue Shield insurance) meets in person with a selection of its end users, brokers for example, and asks them what they want. They contract with specialist companies to conduct usability testing.

• Classmates.com meets with end users and asks them in person among other things, if certain functionality was available would they pay for it?

• Microsoft uses a wide variety of things including extensive user interface testing, Web surveys, customer feedback forms, opt-in PII data and error collection. They outsource a great deal of their backend and UI design, and they have several internal usability teams
Why do companies do all this work to discover what the user wants and who they are?
The end user is king.

Knowing about the customer drives the business in their decision making. Business earns revenue from customers. If a business does not know their customer, they will not know what they need and want. Without this knowledge and the skill to use it they will not be able to conjure the means to effectively satisfy and ultimately attract and keep their customer.

Let’s bring this home with an example, say fixing dinner. What if you went to your folk’s house and your mom asked you to cook dinner, what would be your first step? Perhaps you would ask her, “What is available to cook?” You might crack open the refrigerator look in the cupboards, or even ask, “Who is coming to dinner?”, or “Will dad be home, does he want something grilled outside, do you think?”
What if you were staying at a friend’s house in Guadalajara, Mexico, with a Spanish speaker whose significant other is a vegetarian; would you ask more questions to begin with? Probably you would ask a lot more questions.

Now, imagine you are a professional cook and your income for the next year will depend solely on how well the people eating the dinner you are about to cook enjoyed it. Now what kinds of questions would you ask?

Aha! Things become serious, because your job and income are at stake. As a professional chief you want to know as much as possible in as short of a time frame as you can discover about your diners. Questions would include –
“How much time do I have to select the food, shop for and prepare it?”
“Do your customers have allergies, what are their favorite foods?”
“What are these people like, are they adventurers?”
“What do they do for a living, how old are they, youth, male, female, are they professional food critics?”
and so forth might be the kinds of detailed questions you would ask. If the manager offered you their cell number so you could call them directly and ask, it is very likely that you would.

Using Your Corporate Research
These same principles of inquiry that a cook uses to please their diners are used in user-centered design and development for your corporate site. Information that you have already gathered such as demographics of your customers, which pages receive the most hits, and what your business goals are for the future are all important things which we can use to help you make decisions on the look and feel, and functionality of your websites.

This is achieved by reasoning out who your customers are, gathering demographic and other information about them and from them, finding out what experts say, and investigating your competitor’s sites.

What Can Usability Advise?
There are experts in the field of usability and design that have studied thousands of websites and applications. What advice do they offer which may serve to inform your strategy?

In Web usability Jakob Nielsen is an acknowledged research leader because he has investigated so many sites, testing extensively in usability labs. Dr. Nielsen offers good advice about pitfalls to avoid:

The Top Ten Web Design Mistakes The Ten Most Violated Homepage Design Guidelines
1. Legibility Problems
2. Non-Standard Links
3. Flash
4. Content That's Not Written for the Web
Writing for the Web means making content short, scannable, and to the point (rather than full of fluffy marketese). Web content should also answer users' questions and use common language rather than made-up terms.
5. Bad Search
6. Browser Incompatibility
7. Cumbersome Forms
8. No Contact Information or Other Company Info
9. Frozen Layouts with Fixed Page Widths
10. Inadequate Photo Enlargement
1. Emphasize what your site offers that's of value to users and how your services differ from those of key competitors
2. Use a liquid layout that lets users adjust the homepage size
3. Use color to distinguish visited and unvisited links
4. Use graphics to show real content, not just to decorate your homepage
5. Include a tag line that explicitly summarizes what the site or company does
6. Make it easy to access anything recently featured on your homepage
7. Include a short site description in the window title
8. Don't use a heading to label the search area; instead use a "Search" button to the right of the box
9. With statistics that change over time (stock quotes, etc), give the percentage of change, not just the points gained or lost
10. Don't include an active link to the homepage on the homepage

More importantly Dr. Nielsen also provides advice on what to do instead –

Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability
Make the Site's Purpose Clear:
Explain Who You Are and What You Do
1. Include a One-Sentence Tagline
2. Write a Window Title with Good Visibility in Search Engines and Bookmark Lists
3. Group all Corporate Information in One Distinct Area
Help Users Find What They Need
4. Emphasize the Site's Top High-Priority Tasks
5. Include a Search Input Box
Reveal Site Content
6. Show Examples of Real Site Content
7. Begin Link Names with the Most Important Keyword
8. Offer Easy Access to Recent Homepage Features
Use Visual Design to Enhance, not Define, Interaction Design
9. Don't Over-Format Critical Content, Such as Navigation Areas
10. Use Meaningful Graphics Summary:
A company's homepage is its face to the world and the starting point for most user visits. Improving your homepage multiplies the entire website's business value, so following key guidelines for homepage usability is well worth the investment.
…
Homepages are the most valuable real estate in the world.
…
A homepage's impact on a company’s bottom line is far greater than simple measures of e-commerce revenues: The homepage is your company's face to the world. Increasingly, potential customers will look at your company's online presence before doing business with you -- regardless of whether they plan to close the actual sale online.

While these are presented as hard and fast rules, really they are guidelines and jumping off points for discussion which leads to making every single decision about the strategy, content, and presentation of information on your business websites - portals, intranet, and extranet sites -- driven from a stated business goal.

Information Design Advisor
Jesse James Garrett is an experience design and information architecture author who views things from the other side of the creative-
“Most people will tolerate a degree of impracticality in exchange for a measure of fun.”
”Trying to understand people by analyzing data is like trying to understand the shape of something by looking at its shadow.”

A Site Visit
Now let’s do a brief analysis of your sites, and compare and contrast to your competitor’s sites by using a plausible model, a persona, a use case, and a site visit. What can we learn?

Our persona, Gracie, is a bi-lingual woman in her forties, with a family. She is going to serve as the actor in a use case of visiting your site for the first time to shop for services. She speaks English and Spanish and has some college education, with a moderate amount of technical skills. Gracie wears glasses. She has queried on Google to find a local ISP, and may be interested in other services, such as phone. She likes her bills to be in one unified place, and she loves a deal. She has just come across your site through either that query, or clicked on an ad in a local link to the right. Here is what she finds.

The first thing Gracie noticed was the company logo, which she likes, it’s friendly and happy. After that your potential customer isn’t sure where to begin. The site appears visually cold and a bit dark – there is no personality. All the information on the main page has the same visual weight with the exception of the central ad. Since she isn’t interested in ads, but in information, so she avoids looking at them. This is unfortunate but typical behavior because the information presented in the large central dark advertisements is exactly what she needs to know.

The fonts are generally the same, and the presentation style does not include indents and other visual direction to lead her eyes. Gracie is used to the Web 2.0 look and feel so this site looks old fashioned, very dated to her. She skips over the large grey rectangle presenting “Order Services Online” because, again, it resembles an ad, and over “Check Your Service Availability” because the red is too bright and it reminds her of an onscreen error or warning. At first she just wants to poke around a little.

Gracie clicks a link under “Residential” and then sees a form, so she clicks the browser back and selects another link under “Residential”. No matter what she clicks under Residential these all lead to the same form. She is frustrated because she just wants to browse and get a little more information before typing in any information.

What she notices in one of the revolving ads, the word “for”. Gracie also notices for the first time that there is no option to turn on Spanish for the site, or to increase the font size so she may read it without glasses.

She wonders why so much of the text is red when she hasn’t yet clicked on it yet.

Her time is up on your site. Gracie is disappointed, because the site is not fun, upbeat or modern. It does not function as she expected. She can find stuff, because she doesn’t want to look any more.

This potential customer has not realized how great the prices are because she didn’t actually perceive them. Gracie did not find the information she was seeking about a unified bill because that key information was buried below the fold and between too many other things of the same scale. As Dr. Nielsen put it, as information foragers

“people like to get maximum benefit for minimum effort ... Progress must seem rapid enough to be worth the predicted effort required to reach the destination … your content [should] look like a nutritious meal and signal that it's an easy catch.”

Gracie has not been converted to your services, and will be lead away by the ease of using search. She immediately googles again for a local provider and discovers ATT.com.

Gracie happens to notice that this site can be displayed in Spanish, which is great because her husband prefers reading sites in Spanish! In the large central graphic she notices the link for Shop for Wireless, which combined with the picture makes her eager to click on it.

She is very pleased to see that she can get a free phone, so she clicks on the big image which reminds her of spring. It makes her feel good. The phones are well laid out and she actually loves pink – so she selects the Motarola Razr in Pink and adds the phone to her shopping cart, even though she came to the site expressly to get broadband for their new house.

Gracie decides to read the top questions online for advice of how to optimize her budget and just get one bill with all the services they need. The help file answers almost every question she has. Returning to the main page she obtains service costs and other information by choosing the “coverage viewer” link as was mentioned in the self-service online help file.

Now she decides to comparison shop with Comcast, which also turned up in her Google search.

This is the end of our visit with the persona Gracie visiting these sites for the first time as a use case. So where do we go from here? Back to information management, and analyzing what we have already seen.

Chunking Data – Testing with Wireframes
A senior user experience architect, based on experience, divided the information presented on your corporate site into chunks. Using these information chunks she created the following wireframe, which represents your main Web page:

Company Logo

Coverage Viewer Espanol Sign In Search

Wireless
Phone Broadband
Internet TV – Cable
Enhanced
Free Camera Cell Phones Sale on Bundles | Fun Sports | Games | Movies
One low bill for your communication needs
Privacy Policy | Contact Us | Locations | Shop | Support | Your Account | Billing

This wireframe can be used in user centered design to help your decision making process about what should be on the main page . It will show if it makes sense how to navigate successfully to sub-pages. It also is used to ask users what they would choose or what they would expect to see under each of the links. In this wireframe everything is a link, except the company logo, because the user is already on the main page.

This layout of the information differs a great deal from the existing site. Right now it is based only on what the UI / UX architect observed about your site.

The next step would be to test it internally with you and your teams, tweak the wireframe and test it with a few customers. It is supposed to be generic looking – just to see if the information is expected, and generally in the right locations. We can also ask about the expected functionality under the selections that your customers and potential customers make. Other techniques include cognitive walkthrough, heuristic evaluation, and a site visit, as well as usability testing.

We can use paper prototypes to introduce other information links such as residential, small business, and enterprise. Where does the Feedback link go for example? We can use paper cut outs of the words and phases to see if they work in other configurations. After we massage the content, context, location, and functional plans, then the look and feel will be added, based on the demographics that data mining uncovers about your customers, and with the ideas and kinds of reasons Jesse James Garrett mentioned.

Thank you for your time reading this document. Please feel free email with any questions that come to mind.