ixtility

What sets ixtility apart?

2011-10-25T20:14:00.005-04:00

Web design expertise…

…that goes way beyond what most people think of as "design":

Strategic planning: the role of the web in your overall business plan; how online activities support and extend your brand; customer relationship management.
Information architecture: structuring and labeling your site so people can find what they need
Content strategy: creation, maintenance and archiving of content.
Findability, including search engine optimization and presence on third-party sites and social media (links, ads, videos, testimonials...).

Why design is more than just visual styling

Recommendations driven by user data:

Usability research: qualitatively evaluating where and why users stumble or succeed.
Quantitative analysis of user behavior.

Why you need to understand users

Planning integrated with implementation:

Content management system selection and set-up. Experience with open-source platforms includes Plone, Drupal and WordPress
Accessibility as an integral requirement, not just an afterthought.
Responsive design to enable your content to display well on all kinds of devices including tablets and smartphones.
Processes that your teams can use to keep your web presence effective in a rapidly changing world.

Interested?

Get in touch: ixtility@gmail.com

Down with lorem ipsum, up with content strategy!

2010-05-05T15:45:00.003-04:00

All too often, "web designers" concentrate on visual styling, and visual styling alone.

There's a very easy way to spot people in this camp. They are the ones whose pretty mock-ups are full of meaningless, cod-latin text: Lorem ipsum quod dolor... repeated ad infinitum.

"Oh, that's just placeholder text", they will airily say. "On the actual site, it will be replaced with real content".

Right, real content.

And where will the real content come from, pray? Will someone wave a magic wand so that it flashes miraculously into existence? Hardly. So why do so many so-called "web designers" behave as if this is absolutely the case?

Content is core, central, crucial

Designing a website without considering content in detail is like deciding on what kind of window treatments to put in your new house before you know how many rooms it will have or what they will be used for.

Design is not just about colors and fonts and images. That's styling.

Good design gives the web user what she wants, in the way she wants it, when she wants it. For many sites, what the user wants is information: understandable, digestible, usable content.

Strategy before styling

If you expect to be able to shoehorn your content into lorem ipsum placeholder slots in a pretty visual design, your site is guaranteed to be less effective than if content is at the core of your design.

The type of content your users want -- and who will be creating and maintaining it -- affects decisions on a huge range of issues: platform choice, navigation schemes, search engine optimization techniques, staffing levels, workflow procedures, legal liabilities…

In other words, to have a good website, you need to junk lorem ipsum in favor of a content strategy. From the outset, you need to consider things like:

What content users want, and why
How best to organize, label and present this content
Who will create, post, update, delete and archive it (and who will check that these things are being done appropriately)
What systems are used to store and retrieve it appropriately

Visual styling comes late in the process of design, and follows on from these much more fundamental content decisions.

A number of commentators put the case for content strategy very eloquently. See, for example:

A pithy article in Smashing Magazine by Colleen Jones, author of Clout, the art and science of influential web content
Kristina Halvorson's book Content strategy for the web makes the detailed case for why every organization should base their website on a content strategy, and lays out the process for developing and using content strategies
This article in Interactions Magazine discusses why user experience designers should always consider content strategy
Towards a content-driven design process points at some other useful summaries

Users and audiences: still valid terms?

2010-01-22T11:58:00.002-05:00

Ask me what I do, and I'll reply "user-centered design".

Discuss your online marketing strategy, and you'll probably be talking about "target audiences" and "audience segmentation".

Yet every time I hear the term "user" or "audience" in connection with the web, I wince slightly.

Why?

They seem like relics from the days when corporations broadcast and produced, and individuals received and consumed.

These terms don't reflect the interactive, collaborative, individualistic nature of interactions on today's social web.

Plays and films have audiences: groups of people who sit passively and quietly, watching and listening to what's presented to them.

Products and services have users: individuals who make use of whatever it is, employing some or all of the features incorporated into it by its designers.

In both these usages, the terms "user" and "audience" bring to mind some kind of passive consumption.

But today, we netizens are increasingly involved in shaping our own online experiences. We are taking control of what we encounter online, and altering it to suit ourselves.

To be successful in tomorrow's online world, businesses will have to take account of the fact that customers (and competitors!) are interacting in new ways, many of them outside the organization's control.

Here are two examples of these kind of new interactions: filtering and commenting.

Filtering

People may not be visiting your website at all, but relying on your emails, RSS or Twitter feeds to keep them informed. Perhaps they categorize you in a particular way, for example putting you in a certain Twitter list or having your email or RSS feed go to a particular folder. Maybe they rely on a third party (e.g., another site they trust) to filter for them. Perhaps they only check those categories every so often.

To keep in touch with filterers, you need to continually convince them of the value of what they get from you; many organizations fail to do this.

Commenting

Many sites already allow users to post comments or product reviews. Some companies have set up forums to enable customers to ask questions and provide answers to others. People are increasingly expecting to have this kind of dialogue, and it can be useful for a business to provide relevant channels. (See the book Groundswell for case studies of how companies have benefited from enabling customer dialogue).

So far, so 2005. What's interesting today is that we are seeing more and more avenues for commenting that are not controlled in any way by the organization whose products or services are being discussed. For instance, there is nothing to stop someone from making a video about their interaction with your product and posting it on YouTube... where other people can see it, comment on it, share it, and post their own versions.

Some uncontrolled conversations are effectively transient: such as those that take place on Twitter, facebook and instant messaging channels. These are important, but many people who could potentially see them miss them because of the sheer volume of other material on these channels.

Other conversations are potentially far more permanent. New ways of annotating websites are being developed. Post a comment, and it can last for days, weeks or years. For instance, Google Sidewiki lets you share your thoughts on a website with anyone else visiting that site, quite independently of any commenting capabilities that the site provides.

Better terms than user and audience?

For me, the terms "user" and "audience" imply a one-way, all-or-nothing communication.

But -- as the filtering and commenting examples above illustrate -- interactions on today's web have moved beyond the age of broadcast.

Is it time we found different terms to describe those with whom we interact online?

Interested in your thoughts: please post 'em below.

Why you need to understand users

2010-01-20T12:11:00.002-05:00

When you're looking at a website, what determines the likelihood of your doing a particular thing? Clicking a certain link, for example?

The answer is almost certainly complex. What you do in a particular situation depends on a whole range of interacting variables, including:

Your physical capabilities: is your eyesight good enough to read the font, are you colorblind, can you move the mouse precisely?
Your emotional state and rational context: are you anxious, in a hurry, curious, focused... are you seeking a particular term or image, can you understand the vocabulary and images?
Your history with the interface and others: can you identify what constitutes a link, are you expecting a particular set of navigation options, do you need reassurance that the site can be trusted?

Good site designers ensure that users can do what they want to, and what the business needs them to.

A happy user is one who finds an interface intuitive: they can easily find information, make a purchase, contact someone, or do whatever else it was they thought they would be able to when arriving at a site.

Understanding users is key.

In an ideal world, the designer of every site you visit will know about and cater for:

what motivates and constrains you
hence, what you will notice and understand
and what you expect to happen during your visit

In the real world, web designers don't just need to understand and satisfy you, but tens, hundreds, thousands or millions of other people.

User research gives vital insights.

So how do designers plot a viable path through the maze of possible site structures, visual designs, terminologies, images and so on?

They try to get into the heads of actual users. This involves:

Collecting data about users' knowledge, attitudes and behaviors
Testing out ideas with real users, and improving designs based on their feedback

Fail to do this, and you run a very high risk of frustrating users. Not only are these people likely to turn elsewhere, but they can tell others about their bad experiences.

User research pays for itself very quickly

Many people think that user research will be expensive and time-consuming, so they don't do it.

In actual fact, it can be so fast and cheap that you can incorporate it at several points in your design and management processes.

Simple user research methods are often effective. For example, you can get valuable insights from a morning spent talking with a handful of users, and watching them do various things online.

User research may not always improve your revenues by $300 million, but it will always be beneficial.

There are many different methods for researching users, and I'll be discussing some of them in depth in other posts.

Learn more

These folks make a convincing case for why you can't afford not to spend some time learning more about your users:

Don't make me think, by Steve Krug. Steve is a highly-acclaimed usability consultant: that is, someone who can help you pinpoint where your website fails users, and how to improve it
User Interface Engineering, a firm specializing in usability consulting and training.

ixtility

What sets ixtility apart?

Web design expertise…

Recommendations driven by user data:

Planning integrated with implementation:

Interested?

Down with lorem ipsum, up with content strategy!

Content is core, central, crucial

Strategy before styling

Read more

Users and audiences: still valid terms?

Filtering

Commenting

Better terms than user and audience?

Why you need to understand users