We're Building a Website: Users

I want to begin with a confession. For some time I've felt guilty, perhaps even a little ashamed, about my internet use. I have access to thousands of well-written scholarly articles and interviews at the touch of a button but can't bother committing to read more than a single paragraph. Instead, I feel compelled to click everything feverishly like a five year old with a new toy, onwards and upwards through a labyrinth of pages and hyperlinks and rich media.

What's happening to me? Do I have ADD? Am I lazy? Is the internet making me even more stupid?

As it turns out, I'm just a typical user.

The typical user
When it comes to reading content on the web, we've all got ADD, all a bit lazy. Or rather, we're all task-orientated, enjoy interacting with a range of content, and wish to do everything in the shortest amount of time possible without expending effort thinking about things. Steve Krug wrote a book in 2000 on exactly this topic called Don't Make me Think in which he clearly explains that fundamentally the best user experience is one where everything on a website is self-explanatory and self-evident. 

Where am I? The current M&G Website Experience  
Along with audience research, M&G NSW has spent the last few months reorientating its priorities to learn more about what users want. This has been extremely eye opening for our organisation, revealing the perils of densely written copy, confusing navigation headings, and an unintuitive search function. 

Let's take a look at our current website from a user perspective:

The columned website design with a main menu and second tier sub menu is an effective and simple way of articulating navigation but problems quickly arise. Look what happens if you're in Exhibitions and you click on the Exhibitions Register. All of a sudden you're in Publications. 

Not a big problem but, as Steve Krug writes, confusing people's sense of place on a website is a big no no. Our interpretation of virtual space is analogous to physical space; we look for signposts and directions. This is why "breadcrumbs", the trail that you see at the top of website pages, is so important. Like in the story of Hanzel and Gretel, breadcrumbs provide a path from where you started to where you are. 

Above: An example of "breadcrumbs" on Trip Advisor.

And let's not even get into the label "Publications." What value does this present to you? We're not in the business of publishing so its strange this takes up the ultra premium place in the first tier of our menu. Why wouldn't publications be under "resources"? 

What about the search function? I'll type "Museum" in the search field and see what I get:

Excellent. 

The point I'm making is that every website is made to be USED and when a website like ours has a range of little anomylies that cause momentary confusion or undermine the user's trust, it does not fulfill its fundamental goal. 

So how do we make a usable website?

Designing a website for users
Working with Adrian Wiggins from Pure and Applied we began describing the user experience (UX) visually with simple page layouts called wireframes. These are page schematics depicting the website’s content, interface elements and navigational systems, with a focus on functionality, user behaviour and information architecture. 

Early wireframe of the public homepage. Click to enlarge.

Wireframes
Wireframes represent the interface without getting swamped in design detail, concisely articulating the user experience but allowing for rapid iterations. Adrian made prototypes of pages that offered layout suggestions and also potential types of content. After feedback he would remove, improve and rearrange items. 

In the wireframe above you can see the homepage displays event information, social media updates and quirky items like Object of the Day and Little Known Fact. It also clearly displays access to a map and database of museums, galleries and Aboriginal cultural centres in NSW. 

Our discussions with Adrian ranged from broad conceptual discussions and strategic goals to the nitty gritty details like button placement and menu labels. At every point we needed to meet a simple criteria: Could a user come to our Homepage and know exactly what to do without thinking?

By the end of January, Adrian had compiled an 90+ page document that provided a blueprint for Toben (the designers) and Interaction Consortium (the engineers) to begin building the new website. 

A Typical User?

At the beginning of this post I described the "typical user". Apart from the broad generalizations about UX, most users are an idiosyncratic, contradictory bunch who will respond to webpages in ways that designers and developers never imagined. M&G can hypothesize about user needs till the cows come home but its meaningless until we actually test the website. 

Further information on website user experience:

Steve Krug's website: Advanced Common Sense

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web

Nielsen Norman Group

This blog was updated on March 28 2013.