| HAS YOUR ORGANIZATION wanted to redesign its Web site but perhaps didn't know where to start? How do you know when it's time to redesign? What are your site's most critical problems? Do your constituents find the site easy to use? To answer these questions, I recommend that you first take a step back by conducting a Web audit, and I'll share with you a few tips and tricks to get started.
Setting the stage for success
Today's rule: It's not about you. Chances are your audience doesn't understand your departmental structure. To build an effective user experience, you have to break free of your institutional boundaries, even if only temporarily. Think like the user.
First, convene a session of cross-departmental representatives. Ask them to put their specific needs aside and think holistically about what the organization wants to accomplish. In the spirit of collaboration, you'll arrive at a clear set of goals and priorities that everyone supports. In the long run, this will reduce those testy homepage turf wars. What's more, the result is user- and outcome-focused — a critical mindset shift from the subjective approach often used.
Using the same internal group, next discuss your audiences in detail. List, describe, and prioritize them. Determine the needs and motivators for each audience, in addition to your desired outcomes. It's much easier (and smarter) to see how your site compares against this list rather than an amorphous concept of "a good site."
Site architecture and navigation
Barring a full focus group for your site, you can develop — based on the above priorities — a set of likely user paths. Choose one and look at the current navigation to map the various paths the user may take to complete that task. Flag those that are most likely to be taken. Identify "dead ends" for the user, such as broken links or misleadingly labeled sections. Determine if they're direct enough to satisfy the objective of this particular user action.
When it comes to navigation, quite often organizations tell us that they want to "be different." They want a site with a groundbreaking approach to navigation. They eagerly trot out their departmental section names and talk enthusiastically about doing something funky with the layout.
But sometimes tried-and-true location is best. For some elements of the overall design, like architecture and navigation, users expect certain standards. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen's Law of the Web User Experience states that "users spend most of their time on other Web sites." In other words, their expectations are going to be heavily influenced by experiences on other sites. Anticipate user expectations, and deliver an experience that won't create user roadblocks.
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To determine the best information architecture for your site, take your content apart. Break it down. Identify the smallest units of information — a report, an action, an appeal — and look at it from a user's perspective. Are you organizing the information based on where your users will look for it or on the departments that produced it? For readers whose sites employ a content management system, this can be as simple as making sure that the core content — an article, a photo — is coded with keywords so that it can be called by the system into multiple locations on the site. For readers who leverage static HTML for the bulk of their sites, this approach will warrant a more detailed look at what the best and most likely location of that content should be.
Once you've settled on the architecture, the page design needs to be examined to ensure that the information structure is clear and navigable from every page. I call it the Genie Test. If you were magically beamed to a random page within your organization's Web site, would you be able to determine where in the site you were located, and how you would get back out? Could you navigate to other areas of content?
Make sure your site clearly displays navigation and sub-navigation that indicates the user's location, and titles pages individually with this level of detail. This includes ensuring that your link labels, page titles, and headlines all match as closely as possible. A user shouldn't click "Contact Us" and arrive on a page titled "Feedback." Users want nothing more than to click a link and complete their task.
Screen allocation analysis
Many organizations struggle to decide how much page space to allocate each feature or function — particularly on the homepage. To resolve this dilemma, refer to the priorities identified by your cross-departmental team. These should in turn drive the allocation of screen real estate. Higher priorities should get greater screen real estate than the lower priorities.
Let's apply a little science to this exercise. First, review your priority goals. Perhaps your organization places its highest priority on advocacy and a secondary priority on fundraising. Next, see how much of the site's existing screen space is dedicated to each type of content. Either count the pixels using graphics software or print out the design and measure it. That's right, with a ruler. Keep in mind this isn't an exact science — there are no magic numbers. But if an advocacy organization's homepage contains mostly content and navigation with some fundraising and just a tiny percentage dedicated to advocacy appeals, some reallocation of screen real estate is probably needed.
No time like the present
Whether the outcome leads you to a new look and feel, new site architecture, a new technology path, or simply some subtle changes, a Web audit is the best first step for your organization to reevaluate your site's user experience. You'll have a stronger site vision, a stronger internal team, a more user-centric view, and — in the end — greater results from your organization's Web site
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