 |
 |
     |
|
||||
|
Getting Started — Planning the Web Site Planning is critical because it helps you focus your objectives. It also helps you plan for usability activities that are part of the process of developing a successful site. Before you design, you must think about:
• Why Are You Developing a Web Site? Information architects, designers, developers, and usability specialists should meet with project managers, content owners (subject matter specialists), and users to establish objectives for the site. What you want to achieve is a focused vision of what you — or your company or your agency — wish to do through the site. Set measurable objectives. Think like a business. Develop measurable objectives. Ask questions like these:
Don't limit yourself to objectives like "giving out information" or "being a place for people to come to download documents." While those may be good places to start, they aren't enough to determine success later. (And don't rely on "hits per page" as the measure of how much information you have given out. You don't know if a "hit" was someone who wanted to be at that page. You don't know if a "hit" represents a person actually reading or understanding the information.) Instead, link the objectives to business goals. Objectives might be:
• Who Should Come to Your Site? A public Web site is available to everyone. But "everyone" is not necessarily the best definition of the audiences for your site. Think specifically about the people you want to attract to your site. You almost certainly have customers you want to target, probably several different groups of customers. List those groups. Decide on your target audiences. Sometimes it is useful to think of your target audiences by roles in relationship to the site. A classic division for e-commerce sites is "browsers" and "buyers." For another site, targeted audiences might be divided by type; for example:
For other situations, it may be useful to categorize audiences by profession, age, gender, or other characteristics. The categories that are meaningful are ones that will lead you to think about what content to include and how to organize that content. Keep user characteristics in mind while designing. You should also note several relevant characteristics of each audience to help you build a mental portrait of typical users in each group. For example, relevant characteristics for researchers might be:
Relevant characteristics for cancer patients and their families might be:
Remember that these characteristics are assumptions. During the next phase of Web design, Collecting Data From Users, you should find out whether your assumptions are valid.
• When and Why Will They Come? In the first planning question, "Why are you developing a Web site," you focused on your goals for the site — or your company's goals or the agency's goals. Users also have goals. Most users come to Web sites on what Jared Spool (an expert in the field of usability) calls "missions." They need something. Write several scenarios. To design a Web site that works for users, it helps to write several specific scenarios of when and why users will (or should) come to the Web site. Here are some examples of scenarios:
Get scenarios from users. While it helps to write several scenarios as part of this phase of planning, you can — and should — also get scenarios during the next design step, Collecting Data From Users.
Planning the Web site with users and with users in mind is only the first of several usability activities that are critical in developing a successful site. Many people think of usability only as usability testing. But it is much more than that. It means being focused on users throughout the project. It means involving users throughout the process. It means:
For
more information to help you plan your design
and usability efforts, see:
|
|
|||
