by Peter Merholz
May 7, 2002
Part 2 of 2
Last week I argued for the importance of decentralized organizations to unify their online presences. Now, achieving that is much easier said than done. Over the past few years, we’ve seen a handful of companies that have very successful web experiences despite strongly decentralized organizations. We set out to discover what makes these companies’ sites more effective, and found some consistent characteristics.
1. Create an Independent Web Team
No matter what department the Web team lives in (typically corporate communications or information systems), it’s imperative that their charter allow them organizational independence. Since the website reflects on the entire company, it’s important to ensure clear thinking that’s unhindered by any group’s political sway or perspective. One intriguing approach has been laid out by information architecture guru Lou Rosenfeld, who suggests that this team be created as an internal services consultancy, billing out its services to its “clients,” i.e., other departments in the organization. (Download Lou’s presentation on this, 740k, PPT.)
2. Build Organizational Awareness
Too often, the best designs go unimplemented because there’s insufficient organizational buy-in. Before any significant research or design happens, the Web team must do everything possible to build awareness of their efforts, methods, and motives within the company. In fact, this should begin before the centralized Web team is created. If you don’t get awareness locked up from the start, it will inevitably bite you in the end.
First, it might be necessary to simply sell the value of “user experience” within the company. If your company or client is in the thrall of analysts, direct them to Forrester, who published a notable report titled “Get ROI from Design” claiming “great user experience is critical—but rare.” Some industries already have extensive third-party ratings that can be used to compare your site’s performance to your competitors’. For example, people working in financial services can direct attention to Gomez.com’s scorecards, showing how their company compares with competitors in “Ease of Use.” Such expressions of independent concern will help convince colleagues to pay attention to these issues.
You can then quickly bring this understanding of user experience value home by implementing some “quick wins” in your existing system. Find a precise point of pain, set a metric for success, perform some guerrilla usability testing, design an improvement, put it out there, and measure the improvement. By showing how the work you do will deliver clear results, you’ll convince others of its value. Moving forward, you’ll then need to maintain this metrics orientation to ensure continued support.
3. Study Your Users Before You Design
Your website is nothing without its visitors, so it never ceases to surprise me how often this step gets skipped, ignored, or otherwise devalued. Before even considering design solutions, study the people who already visit your site. Understand their approaches, their methods, how they go about achieving the goals and tasks related to the service you are offering. This is essential to shaping a Web experience that truly reflects their needs, rather than your company’s structures, or what your product manager thought would be “cool.”
The key to this is that a little research can go a long way. A website’s customers probably won’t fundamentally change their behavior for many months or years. One round of solid pre-design user research (whether it’s contextual inquiry, rapid ethnography, or simply good in-depth interviews with current users) should last through many iterations in the product development cycle.
4. Develop A Style Guide
Based on a thorough understanding of what your users need and what the business requires, your Web team can design a system for the site. But it’s unlikely the Web team can implement this system throughout the entire organization, so it’s necessary to create a style guide. Many organizations already have a style guide for their corporate identity, detailing things like logos, corporate colors, corporate typefaces, logo placement, etc (Clemson University offers a good example). Websites need something more involved — a guide that specifies content display, navigation systems, and interaction elements and rules. AT&T and Swinburne University of Technology have good examples. You can also read about the style guide that Adaptive Path partner Jeffrey Veen helped build for Lycos.
5. Implement a Content Management System
Simply documenting consistency isn’t enough. In order for those guidelines to be used throughout the organization, it must be easier for a Web producer to do the right thing than it would be to do their own thing. When you deploy a content management system (a CMS, for short) you can embed the style guide decisions into page templates from which Web developers in your organization can draw. People within departments won’t waste their time reinventing the wheel if an easy solution is simply handed to them.
Peter Merholz is President and a founding partner at Adaptive Path. When he isn’t keeping the world safe for good user experiences, he’s speaking his mind on his personal site, http://peterme.com.
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