We’ve learned that one of the best ways to ensure robust ROI for any website or web app project is to first build an accurate profile of the “desired and likely user,” which we can then use throughout the process to guide key architectural, functional, and aesthetic decisions which would please this “desired and likely user”.  Shorthand, we call it the persona approach.  We didn’t invent it, but it’s really common sense when you think about it.  Say you’re building a house…for whom?  That’s the starting point.

You may care to read Steve Baty’s recent article on the UXmatters site about the building blocks of persona research.  Baty’s overview of the concept is particularly useful as a starting point:

Personas are archetypal representations of audience segments, or user types, which describe user characteristics that lead to different collections of needs and behaviors. We build up each archetype where the characteristics of users overlap.

According to Alan Cooper, author of About Face 3.0 with Robert Riemann and David Cronin, “The persona is a powerful, multipurpose design tool that helps overcome several problems that currently plague the development of digital products. Personas help designers:

• Determine what a product should do and how it should behave.
• Communicate with stakeholders, developers, and other designers.
• Build consensus and commitment to the design.
• Measure the design’s effectiveness.
• Contribute to other product-related efforts such as marketing and sales plans.”

But where do we start looking for the data we need to build up these useful archetypes.

Baty suggests surveys, ethnographic research, interviews, contextual inquiries, and web analytics as the primary research tools to formulate a meaningful persona archetype.  Even for our tiniest projects, ENTERMEDIA tries to get as much information as possible upfront about your probable site or app user so that we can efficiently build assets they can and will use.  As Baty puts it:

One important thing to consider about these different research techniques is that each of them is good in certain ways and can provide insights into different characteristics of your audience. A common refrain among UX practitioners who are looking at personas is to draw upon as many different sources of data as you can. This helps you create a much richer representation of each different persona, but also helps you arrive at much stronger set of personas. Each data source has its own built-in bias, so combining data sets helps mitigate that bias.

You can read the full article here.

Building a website is thought of mainly as a design and development challenge. And it certainly is. That’s indisputably the bulk of our business…ninety percent or more of our leads come to us seeking “web design” or “web development”, or both. Now those broad terms can mean all kinds of things when we start asking our questions. Every project is different. But ultimately that’s where the demand is, and that’s what our business supplies: web design and web development.

However, at some point (earlier the better) the client, the designer, the developer, or (oops?) the end user will each have to stare down the words on the page, and evaluate the message they comprise (or the damage they cause). There is nowhere to hide when it comes to content. If it stinks, the user will give up on you. So you work on it too make sure you don’t waste your time and money on a fancy website that speaks gibberish to the customer.

Would you believe that very often, almost always, the content strategy task of building a website can be just as involved with and urgently important to your ROI as any aspect of design or development? If that is overstating the case, it’s not by much.

What is “content strategy”, you ask?

In this excellent article published recently on one of our favorite websites, A List Apart, Kristina Halverson writes eloquently on “the Discipline of Content Strategy”:

Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.

Necessarily, the content strategist must work to define not only which content will be published, but why we’re publishing it in the first place.

Otherwise, content strategy isn’t strategy at all: it’s just a glorified production line for content nobody really needs or wants. (See: your company’s CMS.)

Content strategy is also—surprise—a key deliverable for which the content strategist is responsible. Its development is necessarily preceded by a detailed audit and analysis of existing content—a critically important process that’s often glossed over or even skipped by project teams.

At its best, a content strategy defines:

• key themes and messages,
• recommended topics,
• content purpose (i.e., how content will bridge the space between audience needs and business requirements),
• content gap analysis,
• metadata frameworks and related content attributes,
• search engine optimization (SEO), and
• implications of strategic recommendations on content creation, publication, and governance.

There’s a lot more to digest in this very enlightening article, plus many others on the subject of writing for the web you should really check out.  We can’t recommend A List Apart enough if you really want to know what goes into building a better website.