When undertaking any piece of design, starting in the right place is so important, but often difficult to do. This, the second of 3 articles covering a usability review covers starting in the right place and asking the right questions.

Starting in the right place

As mentioned in the previous post, gathering requirement & setting a scope provides a solid foundation from which to proceed. At the proposal stage it should already have been possible to check whether or not the requirements are achivable given budgets, time frames and how much the client is prepared to alter. Improvements to a shopping basket process will probably require more than some Photoshop mock ups. However, if there is an appreciation by the client of what’s required, and what’s achievable, then it’s time to get going.

The next thing to do, certainly if it hasn’t already been done, and probably even if it has, is to gather user feedback. Interviews with staff, customers, everyone who uses the site.

What to do when there is no feedback

There are a couple of strategies available for cases when no user feedback is available; ask those around you for feedback, and make yourself a user. In an in-house situation it’s likely that many of your colleagues will have suggestions for improvements, and will have heard feedback from customers. Often it’s possible to provide a strong enough case for placing a survey on the site, or carrying out more in depth reviews with customers. Otherwise constructing user personas, and testing against those is both invaluable and easy to arrange.

Using personas – putting yourself in the user’s shoes

Personas are fictional people whose personalities, knowledge, skill levels and so on, represent a range of typical users of a product or service. Getting into the mindset of site visitors is essential, and having these imaginary characters can be immensely helpful. In the case of the financial services site, which forms the basis of the next article in this series, it might be useful to build personas around existing and potential customers who’s knowledge of personal finance might range from novice to competent to expert.

Examine the experience from a user’s point of view – user journey

Once personas have been prepares, aspects of the site such as layout, tone of text and user journeys can now be tested in relation to the various personas. A good starting point is understanding the routes by which a visitor will have arrived at a page (or set of pages), what they will want to get from that page, and where they will head next – building a user journey. The objective here being to understand what the goals of the website are, determining an easy to follow path, and maximising the chances that the visitor will complete the intended journey.

When I’m asked to provide visual designs to improve conversions, or for designs based on some wire frames, I start to get concerned. When producing a good user journey, all aspects of web design in the broadest sense need to be considered as a whole including: visual design, copy, navigation, page layout,

Document the journey

Making notes about how visitors to a site, real or imagined, experience using the site helps identify areas of strength and weakness. These observations can be used to build requirements for improving the journey. Content may hard to understand, navigation may be hard to negotiate, with routes to complete actions not being obvious enough. Often a journey will assume knowledge which is obivous to someone who’s completed the journey before, but is totally baffling to a novice. Testing, either with real people or personas, should make any barriers very obvious.

See what’s missing

Hopefully by now patterns are emerging. It will be obvious why some things work and some things don’t. At this stage, solutions can be proposed, ideally by noting down possible actions; re-order navigation, reassess copy and so on. Together with the objectives, these form the basis of developing and testing solutions.

Acknowledge when something can’t be resolved

Sometimes all the criteria for a particular page, or detail on a page, simply cannot all be met. Sometimes this is because, with all the features incorporated, a step in the process has become too complex. If this is the case, it’s worth stopping, reviewing the criteria, asking “what is the problem we are trying to solve?” before reviewing both the criteria, and the possible solutions. Are all those features really required at that particular place on a page, or point in a process? Can something be done another way? What other possible solutions are there? Acknowledge that the original ideas or designs are not going to work, find new ones and test them against the new criteria, move on…

Wrapping it up

The completed research and findings can be inserted into a report. I usually try to keep the main body of the report concise, as that generally makes it more likely to be read and understood. Any lengthy analysis can be placed in an appendix for reference.

Tags:

• Information architecture
• User experience
• user journey
• Web design