Design useful websites

A user agenda is always in play

Adapted from The User Experience, The iceberg analogy of usability, Dick Berry,User Experience Design, IBM Ease of Use team

Users know what they want to do. They just don't realise how much their decisions and behaviour are triggered by their sub-conscious agenda.

A user agenda is specific to the task  and any number of people from different demographics or social backgrounds will share the same set of agenda triggers for a particular task.

Useful for whom?

Sometimes the navigation is awkward, sometimes some layout or design element thwarts user intent, but almost always users abandon their website experience just when they are ready to read or transact because the 'engagement point' is not designed to support their agenda.

... And Google's Product Manager agrees

"The utmost thing is the user experience, to have the most useful experience. It's important to differentiate between 'usefulness' and 'usability'. At Google, we make a *useful* tool, and then we put a *usable* interface on top of that. One has to precede the other. If you have usability without a useful product, you don't really have much."

Google Interview: Marissa Mayer, Product Manager
Good Experience newsletter: October 2002

It all comes down to the degree of intersection between what businesses want users to do and what users are prepared to do. Users want a successful, comfortable experience on the websites they visit. Deliver that experience and you engage your users.

How? Mine your business knowledge of customers

Business people are constant observers of customers. They know what customers expect, what customer priorities are, what customers assume about services and information, and what customers won't tolerate.

And business knowledge is not a momentary snapshot like a survey, a focus group or a usability test. Business knowledge is validated by time and experience, and extends over all customers not just a sampling.

I collaborate with business teams to capture and organise that business knowledge using structured analysis techniques. We use the outputs of our analysis to design the website architecture, website content areas and even email copy.

Does this approach seem radical?

New ideas are emerging about what triggers user engagement and they are challenging the validity of methodologies and techniques that have been doggedly followed since the late 1980s.

Just consider the implications of Geoffrey Moore's "informed intuition"¹ or Malcolm Gladwell's "power of context"²... and Gerald Zaltmann doesn't hold back his extreme scepticism³ about "marketing's most overused tools - surveys, questionnaires, and focus groups".

It's simple - don't ask users because business knows!

Talk to me

If you are taking up the challenge of making your website users achieve your business objectives, talk to me. The techniques I use will enable you to apply your rich business and customer knowledge to the point where users engage or disengage with your website and email content.

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1. Moore, Geoffrey A., Crossing the chasm, Marketing and Selling Technology Products to Mainstream Customers, HarperCollins Publishing, 1999.
2. Gladwell, Malcolm, The Tipping Point, How little things can make a big difference, Abacus, 2001.
3. "Despite the resources spent on market research, nearly 80 percent of new offerings fail. The pattern is predictable: Customers say they want something, companies create it, and once it's available, customers don't buy it. Why? Is it because customers don't know what they want? Gerald Zaltman... concludes that, at some level, customers do know, but marketing's most overused tools - surveys, questionnaires, and focus groups - and conventional thinking don't dig deeply enough to help them discover and express it."
   
   Cover flap of Gerald Zaltman's How Customers Think, Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market, Harvard Business School Press, 2003.