ITC200 > The Strategy Plane
The scope of your website is fundamentally determined by the strategy of your site – what the company is trying to gain from the website and what they want the users to leave their site with. In order to create a successful strategy to develop our site from, we need to look into two key aspects of why our site is going to exist:
- Site Objectives: What is the purpose of this site and how will it help in achieving or business goals?
- User Needs: What types of things does our audience want from this site in order to sell them on our products or services?
Defining the Strategy
The most common reason that sites fail is not because their technology isn’t sound. It is because the company was not in touch with what a website can do for them in terms of meeting their business goals and what users are actually wanting from their site in terms of an overall experience.
Therefore, we need to answer a few basic questions that will aid in defining a strategy that will help our website be successful:
- What do we want to get out of this site? – By answering this question we will be able to describe the overall site objectives coming from within the organization
- What do our users want to get out of this site? – By answering this question we will be directly addressing “user needs”
Site Objectives
The first part of defining our strategy is examining our own site objectives for the site – being sure that everyone’s ideas line up is key:
Brand Identity: a set of conceptual association or emotion reactions that in the mind of your users is an overall impression about your organization that they formulate as they use your site
Company X wants to re-brand themselves as an energy conservation/efficiency company.
- This is critical to driving sales and marketing efforts in the new social and political environment arising from the necessity for energy independence, cleaner energy production, and responsible global stewardship.
- Focus on the recent movement (politically and socially) to rethink our energy policies that has brought Company X’s message/product/benefits/value proposition to the forefront.
- Leverage the idea of a rift between “old” and “new” Engineers. A mentality of “business as usual” versus “environment, efficiency, and innovation.”
- The “New Engineers” in today’s market are not only looking for efficient, environmentally friendly, solution, they’re supporting it. Furthermore, the current social perspective is that we must be more efficient and clean. That we must reduce our footprint.
- Obama’s policies will only serve to further fire up this topic and bring it into the general, public eye. Thereby, providing an environment of people not only willing to listen to an alternative, but actively looking for one.
Promote the Project Portfolio and let the work speak for itself
- The most convincing argument to owners and administrators of organizations that would purchase Company X valves should come from Company X’s track record.
- With 20 years of experience and hundreds of success stories and notable advocates from well respected institutions, they should be able to successfully leverage their know how, experience and reputation as an industry leader to better drive sales and overcome some of the more conservative and competitive hurdles that seem to have stymied them in the past.
Business Goals: internal strategic objectives that are intended to make or save the company money
Website must constantly reinforce and encourage contact with sales team.
- New client sales probability is dramatically increased after contact with Company X sales engineers.
- Driving site users to make contact by phone or email is critical to the success of the website.
The website needs to become an effective technical reference for their products.
- While the owner/administrator audience has the most sway in allocating purchasing money, they rely heavily on the input of both engineers internal to their organizations and external consultants embedded within their organizations.
- These are often the bottlenecks that cite cost and proven value as a reason to not use Company X valves. A deeper discussion of the engineering effectiveness and convincing, quantitative evidence to back up efficiency claims needs to reinforce the higher level business value proposal.
Success Metrics: concrete indicators of how effectively the user experience is meeting strategic objectives and goals: visits per month, time per visit, increase of revenue, etc.
User Needs
We need to understand that we are not designing this website for ourselves – we are designing for other people and we need to understand what they want and need out of our website
By dividing our audience into smaller groups of users that have key characteristics in common, called User Segmentation, we can define the users needs in more manageable chunks:
Target Audience
- Primary – Decision Makers: CEO, CFO, Property Manager, Architects, Engineers (Innovators), Energy Service Companies
- Secondary – Influencers/Authorities: Consultants from competing companies, Engineers (business as usual), “On the ground” employees, Flow Energy?, Building Contractors, Industry publications
Audience Insights
- Focus on the recent movement (politically and socially) to rethink our energy policies that has brought Flow Control’s message/product/benefits/value proposition to the forefront.
- Leverage the idea of a rift between “old” and “new” Engineers. A mentality of “business as usual” versus “environment, efficiency, and innovation.”
We also need to understand how much these users know about the subject matter of our site and what website trends they may be familiar with. To understand this we need to perform User Research – a field devoted to collecting the data needed to develop that understanding using tools such as surveys, interviews and focus groups.
We can then start to develop User Personas with the following criteria:
- Demographics: gender, age, education level, marital status, income, etc.
- Psychographics: describe the attitudes and perceptions that this user has about the world, technology, etc.
- Taskographics: describe a typical task the user might perform on the new site? (For example, register, log on, search for information, buy a specific product, send their email address, or call for more information.)
- Sellographics: what types of written and/or visual information does this user want in terms of how it relates to your products or services in order to make that “sale.”
Great slide share from @ IA Summit 2008.
by Leah Buley
UX designer at adaptive path
UX Team Of One
http://www.slideshare.net/ugleah/how-to-be-a-ux-team-of-one
The MBTI personalities quad:
The framework distinguishes four types of people: competitive, spontaneous, humanistic and methodical.
By solving design issues for all these types of website users we can be sure to cover a wide variety of perspectives.
Quad:(downloads)
http://www.henkwijnholds.com/mbti-sketching-paper-ideation/sketching/
History:
http://www.henkwijnholds.com/mbti-framework-sketch-ideas/sketching/
Design for users, not your client or yourself.
http://www.3point7designs.com/blog/2008/12/09/dont-design-for-your-client-or-yourself/