Creative Component - The Redesign

For the fifth podcast in the re-design series, I had a great time speaking with Kate Rutter, a Senior Practitioner for Adaptive Path. During Kate’s ten plus years in the web industry, she’s honed her talent for bringing companies and customers closer together through smart strategies and inventive design. She actively embraces the term “specialized generalist.”

Grab the MP3 File | duration 38:34

These are some of Kate’s comments during the interview…

“A crucial element to site evaluation is — Make sure you understand what kind of questions your visitors will be asking of your site, and designing to fit those needs.”

“If you’re starting something new, it’s important to look-around and find-out how other people are doing that. For example, if people are looking for “software providers”, as they’re looking for tools, then what kind of forums or questions are being asked to help them make decisions around that? Very often they will go to peers, other social networks, other information support systems that are outside of the competitive, or even service area that your site will live in. It’s important to look outside to get that kind of information.”

“The key thing about evaluation, when starting something new is putting a really firm stake in the ground and deciding who you want to be, and for whom. Until you have a pretty good sketch of what that looks like, you can do allot of research and exploration for very little impact and very little usefulness.”

“Deciding who you are, and who your audience is, how you want to engage with them, and how you want to bring value to your site and your company, as well as the users you’ll be engaging with is the crucial question.”

“From Jesse James Garrett’s Elements of User Experience, the five different elements that he defines are an excellent structure for accessing to what degree do you want to evaluate what really matters to you. The elements are a great mental container to figure-out how to approach this big open beast of pure evaluation.”

If you have a site, taking a fresh look by asking:

• How is it performing in the strategy — what you’re trying to accomplish, how your users are going to engage with you?
• How is it performing as far as scope? — the features and functionality you bring to it.
• How is the structure/the relationship of the features? Is it working? Is it usable?
• Is the arrangement of the elements on the pages understandable?
• What does it look/sound like? What is that surface telling people?

“If you break it down into all of those components, then you can figure-out which of the elements to I need to focus on to get this right. It’s going to really depend on how much information you’ve got out there, how many new features you need to build, etc.”

On The assessment of a site:
“By loose definition, the assessment has to live as a comparison from something to something. For each of the chunks of a site, there should be a purpose why that stuff is there. Has it always been there? Ask the simple question: What work is this piece of the site doing? If it’s not contributing to helping the users make decisions; if it’s not working to close that gap, then it’s probably not working for your site at all.”

“It’s considered R.O.T., which is REDUNDANT, OUTDATED, TRIVIAL. Those things you can just let go of; when you do, it’s very cathartic.”

To repeat the five layers of user experience you should bake-into your assessment cake are:

• STRATEGY: What you do, what your users do, what you get out of the site experience.
• SCOPE: What features and content is contained.
• STRUCTURE: The relationship of how the features and the architecture fit together.
• SKELETON: The placement and arrangement of the various elements.
• SURFACE: The images. text, brand, look & feel — the voice.

LINKS PROVIDED BY KATE:

The Elements of User Experience
Jesse James Garrett
http://www.jjg.net/elements/
(You can download the summary diagram of the elements from here.)

Content essay with Kristina Halvorson & Kate Rutter
http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/essays/archives/000959.php

Kristina Halvorson of Brain Traffic
http://www.braintraffic.com/

Jeff Veens old but still great essay on content inventory
Doing a Content Inventory (Or, A Mind-Numbingly Detailed Odyssey Through Your Web Site)
http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/essays/archives/000040.php
It’s a great way to start a site assessment.

• Why is site evaluation important?
• The best way to improve the effectiveness of a Web site is to have data that indicates how it’s performing. That would primarily be based on visitor’s experience. How do you get this information?
• Using tools that we’ve talked about before, like Google Analytics or Woopra, I can view the number of visits to a page, etc. But how can I measure satisfaction?
• I can know my audience through research: Surveys, Phone Calls, What about Profiles or fake personas? How are these effective? Like designing a site based on needs and expectations?
• I want to collect both quantity and quality results. What sort of Web Metrics or Web Analytics?
• What about Usability testing?
• What about Quality and Compliance?
• What about Usability Goals — setting performance goals for your users. Can you talk about that? (the time it takes a user to find specific information, or submit data) — I sometimes think about this topic when bailing on an e-commerce form, hoping they’ll see me running-away from the transaction.

Special thanks to Kate and Adaptive Path for providing such great information!