Knowing Your End User Makes Your Company King

It's pretty simple - knowing about one's customer drives the business in decision making. Business earns revenue from customers. Business needs to know what customers 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. In just the same way you can ask your end users questions and divine what you need to know.

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 information presented, functionality, and look and feel 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 and field site visits using a variety of methods. Dr. Nielsen offers good advice about pitfalls to avoid:

The Top Ten Web Design Mistakes / 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

The Ten Most Violated Homepage Design
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 viewpoint:
“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.”

Next time: A persona makes a site visit ...

[1] Jakob Nielsen, The Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designmistakes.html/ accessed March 3, 2008
[2] Jakob Nielsen, The Ten Most Violated Homepage Design Guidelineshttp://www.useit.com/alertbox/20031110.html/ accessed March 3, 2008
[3] Jakob Nielsen’ Alertbox, Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20020512.html/ accessed March 3, 2008
[4] You may enjoy a visit to Jesse James Garrett’s site as well - http://blog.jjg.net/ accessed March 5, 2008