G.1440 is currently working with US Lacrosse, the national governing body for Lacrosse in the US, on a full overhaul of their websites and use of technology in general.  US Lacrosse has many key stakeholder groups that each have different needs online, and they house a tremendous amount of data on the site, which makes site usability the ultimate challenge.

How do we get the information that people need to the people that need it?

Luckily, G.1440’s team are experts at designing web usability.  Our process is thorough and starts with research – after all, we can’t deliver important information until we know what information is important!

As an online marketer, it’s exciting whenever we’re able to help improve the user experience on a site.  A great user experience is the key to long customer relationships and referrals.

But creating a great experience starts with users, and in this case you can help, too!

If you’re familiar with US Lacrosse, take a few moments to fill out our brief 9 question survey, or participate in a card sort:

http://www.uslacrosse.org/enews/websurvey.phtml

Just because something’s on sale, doesn’t mean it’s a deal.

I came across a quick post on one of my favorite consumer blogs with the image below:

Not everyone will spell it out so clearly, but many times, the “sale” isn’t really a deal.  Some Marketers will tout this as the best way to push products.  Mark up the “normal” price, then put it on “sale” for the original price.

I could easily launch into a page-long posting about giving real value to your customers and G.1440’s decade of experience doing just that, but I’ll spare the sales pitch for another post.  Just have a good chuckle at this photo, pass it along to a friend, and try competing with a user-friendly website that demonstrates the value in your products instead of a sign that says “Sale!” just for fun.

Your website needs advertising, and your advertising needs your website.  The most interactive and beautiful website is worthless if no one sees it, and all the site traffic in the world is no good unless your website is able to capture attention and translate traffic into customers.

But, as we face an economic slowdown that’s surely effecting everyone, businesses everywhere face the difficult dilemma of tight spending limiting advertising budgets at a time when new business and customers are needed more than ever.  The result? A shift in spending from traditional media to online spending.

To be clear, the increase in online advertising is not offsetting the decline in traditional ad spend, and overall US advertising spend will be down about 4% in 2009 according to Media Futurist Jack Myers.  But amidst this decline, emarketer is still projecting double digit growth for online advertising.

Perhaps the hardest hit sector of the media landscape is TV.  According to the November 3, 2008 Advertising Age, TV advertising slipped 1.3% 2008 – even when you include the boost from the election and the Olympics.  Without political spending and Olympic advertising, TV ad dollars would have fallen 2.4%.  This while online advertising is projected to grow some 14-16%.

It seems that in a time when ad dollars are becoming more and more precious, advertisers are counting on the two big promises of Internet advertising – Targeting and Tracking.

These concepts aren’t new!  Every TV show targets a specific demographic which advertisers try to latch onto, and the TV ratings of any given program will give you an idea of who saw what.  But between DVR and the growth of online media, who knows who’s actually watching those commercials.  Online advertisers can reach out to people based on their web history, demographics, and even the interests they express in their social networks.  So instead of paying a lot to reach everyone, they can pay less to reach just the audience that they’re looking to sell to.  Search ads go a step further, reaching out to people actively seeking to buy!

Also, with Google Analytics leading the charge, free tools exist that allow websites to track an absurd amount of user actions with their website.  Ultimately, advertisers can see what ads are working, and make changes on the fly to constantly improve.

Analytical tools are also crucial to understanding how users interact with your website, and how users move through the buying process.  Remember, driving traffic to a website is only half the battle! Once a user’s found you, they’ll need to be able to find what they need quickly.  Online, we all have the attention span of a 5-year old.

I’m sure none of this is groundbreaking stuff, but as the economy scares everyone and shrinks budgets worldwide, the message is important:

A user-friendly website that converts traffic into buyers and informed online advertising is the most effective mix for winning in a down economy.

When considering a website redesign, think about what the purpose of the redesign is beyond the aesthetics. Ask yourself what primary action do I want the user to take upon reaching our homepage.

When HR wants to add Careers in the main navigation, gently tell them that adding it would distract clients from the primary goal of the website but that it can certainly be within the utility navigation at the bottom. If someone is looking for a job, they will spend longer than the average 8 seconds trying to find the link.

Another common interloper on homepages is the news. Having a prospective client read your news is rarely the main action you want them to take. If the news must be on the homepage, then consider putting it below the fold where it won’t be a distraction.

Give your users what they want on your website. After all, your website isn’t there to announce the corporate picnic this weekend – it’s there to position your brand and drive sales!

At G.1440, we believe in starting with the user. G.1440 approaches every web site design by adhering to User-Centered Design principles and practices. User-centered design is a methodology that concentrates on product design and development from user, user goal and user interaction perspectives. Its goal is to provide easy-to-use, desirable applications. Outlined below are the steps that we take to ensure that we are meeting the user’s needs and helping users to accomplish goals through our design work.

CREATIVE BRIEF

G.1440 issues a creative brief to every client. It is a simple questionnaire that is designed to help elicit responses from the client to help in the discovery, analysis, and strategic planning of each project. We ask that all major project stakeholders complete the brief because doing so can help surface differences of opinion and help us to present a unified and commonly agreed upon strategy for the project.

KICKOFF MEETING

We always start a project with a kickoff meeting to review the statement of work, the project’s goals, and make sure that everyone involved in the project understands each person’s role. This meeting also serves as a chance to review competitor sites and talk about design goals.

STRATEGY DEFINITION AND COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

Some clients prefer to have us document the results of the kickoff meeting and write up a formal strategy document for the project. This can include a competitive analysis that documents the pros and cons of any competitor’s web site.

PERSONA DEVELOPMENT

Users have goals when visiting a site. When designing a web site, we try to accommodate those goals through clear and concise navigation imagery that will communicate ideas to the user, and textual areas that will reinforce those ideas.Personas are a tool used for designing and planning web sites. They are character sketches that are meant to represent the kinds of users we anticipate coming to a web site.The job of personas is to give the team a common frame of reference when making decisions about what a web site should offer: 

• By attaching a name and a face to our users, they become more real to both the client and the design team
• By describing their current life situation, we can empathize and understand the goals of our users
• By identifying our business objectives, we can offer our users products and services that complement their needs
• By thinking of our users as real people, we can avoid attributing our desires and goals to them (Instead of stating "I think the web site should do this," we can say "Tom, the loyal customer needs to find this information"…)

Finally, personas are based on research. It is always our preference to interview actual users to collect raw data concerning real users’ goals, frustrations, opinions, preferences, and ideas regarding a new web site. This allows us to put real findings into personas. For some clients, this is not a possibility. In such cases, G.1440 will create ad hoc personas that still present a great deal of value for the client and our design team in trying to visualize and design for prospective users.

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

Taking into account the business goals outlined by the creative brief, G.1440 will propose a revised or brand new information architecture. We believe in defining and planning how we structure the information presented on a web site up front to guarantee a better user experience. Completion of this task helps plan for flexibility in terms of future phases and changes that need to be made to a web site as well.

WIREFRAMES

Especially on web sites that are data intensive or have layout challenges (for example, how to display products in a search results format or how to display products in a categorized approach), G.1440 recommends wireframing pages. The advantage of this exercise is that it takes the emotion out of the page layouts and helps the team focus on page real estate and how that can accommodate user goals. We encourage clients to consider doing usability testing at this stage with paper prototypes (or basic, navigable html prototypes). If something is clearly working (or not working), identifying these issues early on saves time and money before moving on to design comps.

DESIGN COMPS

Once approval for the wireframes has been received, we move on to skinning them. G.1440 designs all comps in PhotoShop. Static JPEGs are posted on our design extranet for review and approval.

USABILITY TESTING

If testing was not performed in the Wireframing stage, we definitely recommend it at this point. G.1440 has worked with Blue Bear, LLC and Human Factors International in the past on various projects. Usability testing can be performed on static comps. Following testing, revisions can be made to the comps and the comps can be re-tested. Or, we can move on to building the designs in XHTML.

WEB STANDARDS

G.1440 recommends always building sites to the latest technology. We adhere to Web Standards (XHTML 1.0 Transitional, using CSS for layout and reserving tables for tabular data) when building out web sites. This helps future-proof your site, makes it easier to change the appearance over time, and keeps the page size smaller.