So you’ve got a website.

Great!  But who uses it, and how?

The number of times we come across poorly functioning websites that don’t meet user expectations is far too common.  There are some real shockers but some can get away with it.

If you’re selling a Widget online and it’s red or yellow, and does ‘stuff’, then you promote how ‘cool’ those colours are, explain ‘stuff’ and ask for the cash.  Easy right?

But what if you sell a ‘Widget’ and then an unrelated ‘Service’ alongside it?  Well your delivery is unclear.  Your users wonder what you’re really on about.  Do they trust you?  Will the Widget sell as much as it would in a dedicated site?  Probably not.

And, what if you have 10 different Services from different business units and each of these has a range of Widgets they also need to push?  How effective will that be?  There’s an overarching issue in having lots of users with contrasting needs and behaviour patterns.

We end up in a game of ‘steering chances’ as we’re not solving one problem, but many.

We can only aim to serve a balance and try and appeal to the triggers of each group of users.  We have to find a balance otherwise we’d be building 10-20 sites instead of one; creating a whole host of other problems.

So how do we try to do this?  We have to profile users, match products and services to their needs, understand how they want to interact and what they expect.  On top of this we need to understand if we can stick it all in one bucket without overly compromising on the delivery.  If we mess this up the whole site will be poor at delivering everything.  Oops!

Consider a commercial organisation with a range of business units.  These are sometimes well marketed and understood by the user even before they press enter.  So maybe consumers know your offering – in most cases, they have some brand association, some recognition in the back of their mind – if it’s a great brand it will be front of mind… Organisations that are well known offline have a much easier time dealing with their users online.

But sometimes a brand is not well known.

Take a large government department as an example.  They are often delivering multiple business units that sit together for ministerial reasons rather than consumer reasons.  What does a user expect of those sites?  They provide so many different services and products.  Consumers just won’t get it.

Government department sites commonly aren’t marketed clearly to the consumer in offline media either.  The user expectation isn’t set.  When the user lands on these sites they need the story to be told, there’s a message to deliver, they will be faced with so many different business units and initiatives all fighting for attention, and worse, there’s usually a bunch of policy and stale information that the government is obliged to push to them.  How on Earth can sites like that be effective?

The only way to get a result with a large and broadly complex site is to architect it from the ground up to meet user needs and behaviour, not those of the organisation or how it functions.

These large and cumbersome sites have often become so hard to manage and so distant from user needs that the only path forward to is take a lot of steps backward first.

Start with usability analysis, scope business needs and user needs, profile the users, develop a plan to service their needs and have a rationale in place to test EVERYTHING against it all the time.  When you’ve built it – go and test it – and then get ready to go back through it all over again whenever something changes in your organisation.