Disparate units all working from one common framework and lacking the individual attention they need to provide an efficient web offering to the Tasmanian public was an immensely confronting problem.

Concerns about who the target audience was ‘really’ comprised of and how they wanted to interact with DHHS, we engaged a specialist usability firm to undertake focus group explorations for needs, wants, and behaviour. This was supported by a mix of online and moderated testing for information architecture to build and assess the effectiveness of a new content structure.

Combining months of research Future Medium presented a strategy which clearly addressed the following issues:

1. What users wanted and their behaviour online
2. What business units needed and how to match this to user expectations
3. A rationale for a revised design
4. A revised information architecture, content authoring process, and stakeholder management recommendations
5. Comprehensive use cases and associated wireframe design plans; and
6. A structured management plan for the next 12 months.

Nobody’s actually asked me that in the last 6 months but this issue has stopped almost every commercial social networking project in its tracks.  I’ve lost count of how many businesses have come to me with dubious enthusiasm to push their product or service and gone home sour after picking apart the fundamentals.  Now hopefully this isn’t a reflection of my character and more so a reflection of the relatively intangible value and uncertain path to leveraging social networking for commercial outcomes rather than individual benefits.

So what’s the problem?

I think the need for fundamental mindset shifts are coupled with marketing challenges to form two significant barriers.  That and of course the wad of cash needed to build something like a Facebook application.

When people group together to derive value from one another online I think there’s a point where a critical mass must be realised.  There’s a point where the return is clear and self sustaining – I call it social momentum.  Facebook has done it, but just because there are lots of users doesn’t mean they want anything to do with your business.

I’m concerned about how we get through this phase of web interaction from a commercial standpoint.

There’s a broad spectrum of ways of taking advantage of this movement.

• Some people want to build Facebook-style functionality into their sites to hold richer member or customer profiles and let them do status updates, blogs, comments, and ratings… but do people really want this?  It can look great for you i.e. ‘you care’ and want to give ‘freedom of speech’ to your members or customers – but – how many of us users really want to have accounts across tens or hundreds of sites in order to contribute?  I don’t!  And so I wonder what business value is there in simulating functionality that exists all over the place anyway?
• Another example would be a brave commercial entity devoting effort to setting up a simple forum – knowing very well that this could be a political and media nightmare that damages them.  Well is that where the customer is going to put a complaint (or maybe praise) or will they vent it through rating a Google search result or some other highly visible and highly trafficked area?  In this case the brave organisation may end up with a disused forum that has moderation staff allocated to it…  It is tough to know where you’ll get the value from.
• If you were a real estate company you could build a Facebook application that let prospective home buyers display and rate properties they were considering from you.  But I don’t think these things work for commercial entities because the data is so limited and consumers don’t work in such narrow channels – they’d want to list properties from multiple agencies.  So if you were a real estate company you’d be better off investing in building a universal application that showed your competitors too.

So we hit on a nerve here.

To do something successful you may have to shift your thinking and be open to abuse, criticism, supporting your competitors, sharing secrets and so on… and maybe give benefit to someone other than yourself.  But that’s kind of the essence isn’t it?  If you’re doing something in the social sphere then you need to play to the need of the masses and not that of your organisation.

Will the brave be the ones that are rewarded for their risks in this open new world?  I think so.

If I could give you advice on this problem it would be to play to your own strengths as an organisation and not fear competitors working alongside you.  Use your brand credibility to build something interesting and of social value and the seemingly intangible return will be channelled via increased exposure and association with something hopefully cherished by your customers.  But what that is exactly will need great consideration and advice.

Considering that blogs, forums, and feedback tools are cheap functions to buy then it has to be worth a punt at face value.  Just don’t expect it to work without a serious marketing push, a well seeded base from which to operate, and some ongoing investment.

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.

Better than 2 new front teeth?  Well maybe, I don’t know, as it depends on your smile agenda but what I do know is that with the advent of yearly financials, budget forecasts, staff reviews and accounting preparations there is a critical series of reports which are gaining increasing attention at senior management levels, home based businesses and even not for profits across the world.

 Put the pin in the right targets with Google’s Web Analytics.

Your website reporting is soon to take on a more proactive role within your business and if you or your business has not stopped to understand your web visitor’s behaviour then perhaps the resolution needing most work for the 09/10 financial year should be to take on the power of Web Analytics.

What you do with the reporting can make or break your online aspirations – no point in collecting pages and pages of data, pretty graphs and countless statistics if you fail to understand and indeed act on the findings.

Ploughing through your web analytics can be time consuming, draining as well as frustrating especially if you haven’t quite worked out what all the facts and figures mean…let alone plan to improve user visitation behaviour and usage patterns.

At Future Medium we use 5 key analytics ‘must do’s and these form the backbone of our client analytics training.

• TIP 1: LANDING PAGES

Often what we see on our sites tends to excite us, our staff and our friends but what behaviours are the site visitors exhibiting?  If you install Google’s free Analytics into the code of your website you can see at the click of a button how effective your pages are to everyone outside of your peer group – the group of people that really affect your websites ROI.

If poor percentages are showing then consider the effect of the page’s message, the call to action, even the effectiveness of a recent AdWords campaign.  It’s not all doom and gloom though – if the bounce rates are disconcerting don’t despair – use it as a catalyst for change…or at the very least a reason to visit Google’s free Website Optimizer – this tool is invaluable and can really improve website visitation and conversion.

• TIP 2: GOAL SETTING

Not the 5 kilos to be lost before the summer swimsuit season – but the goal setting function found in your Google Analytics account.

From our experience most of the websites we work with have more than one goal, the idea is for you to identify all the goals then go about and measure them.  Need a hand?  Consider customer behaviours that assist your business; online loyalty, offline sales, online sales, contact us, newsletter signups page – think hard and make the necessary changes to your goals.

The summation is simple; whilst you cannot set a goal to create visitor loyalty you should create a more solidified aim – ‘our website will see 50% of visitors return more than once in any given month’

It’s easy to look at your analytics data and know you are bringing in the business but how good would it be to use industry benchmarks to set some goals and grow your online presence?  By enabling benchmarking in Google Analytics, you can view metrics for similar sites within your category such as real estate sales.  These benchmarks enable you to identify areas of opportunity relative to the performance of your competitors.

• Tip 3: BENCHMARKING

Benchmarking, the word either excites you or frazzles you.  How is your website stacking up against similar industry organisations, well with the tooling available through Google you can easily gain external context to your online performance.

It’s easy to look at your analytics data and know you are bringing in the business but how good would it be to use industry benchmarks to set some goals and grow your online presence.

By enabling benchmarking in Google Analytics, you can view metrics for similar sites within your category such as real estate sales.  These benchmarks enable you to identify areas of opportunity relative to the performance of your competitors.

Did you know benchmarks are available for bounce rates, actual visitors, page views, average visit time, page views per visit and even a percentage of new visits both locally as well as from abroad?

• Tip 4: UNDERSTAND WHAT PEOPLE SEARCH FOR

How do people find your site?  What keywords do they regularly use to get there?  The trick here is realising that these keywords aren’t necessarily what they wanted to use – more so the ones that were actually effective.  Consider if you sell used cars -  but your site is not optimised for the keyword ‘used’ but you are well optimised for ‘car sales’ – the analytics will show great search traffic for ‘car sales’ but not ‘used car sales’.  This doesn’t mean your users are only searching for car sales!  Whilst useful in understanding some of your user behaviour you really need to know your customer well to know what they want.

• Tip 5: UNDERSTAND AND TRACK WHERE YOUR VISITORS GO

Analysing paths through site content is very important.  Whilst page popularity is essential as a metric it’s more useful to know how the users move about.  Take a contact or enquiry page as an example.  What’s the most common page that was viewed prior to landing on a contact/enquiry page?  Hopefully it’s a product view or a services description that inspires them.  If it were commonly a page about FAQ’s or service faults then maybe it tells you that users aren’t finding what they need.

Continuing on from last week’s article we’re going to help you with selection criteria for future proofing your online presence. Wikipedia eloquently states

“The phrase future proofing describes the elusive process of trying to anticipate future developments, so that action can be taken to minimize possible negative consequences, and to seize opportunities.”

The web and web technologies are ever changing; always evolving. Amusingly for those of us in the industry it seems as if the only constant is change. Consumer behaviour changes in part as a response to emerging technologies. We adopt new ways of doing everyday things. What may once have been a geek’s playground indeed tends to become a common tool or product that even your granny knows about. Take YouTube and Facebook for example.

Evolutionary trends and fads aside, your investment must generate return. You should expect a clear and tangible gain in efficiency, improvement in service, or measured exposure of your brand or initiative on an ongoing basis. Old hat measures of site traffic are not much more than a pat on the back telling you something is happening…. but what? Did you plan clear and measurable goals to deliver return on investment? Do you report on these at regular intervals and plan actions to tweak or change the course of your digital strategy accordingly? Were you encouraged to seek out integration points in your traditional business when you built your web asset? Did you integrate knowledge of your current user behaviour and determine how to keep an eye on shifting needs?

Diagram of various web criteria

Why have I raised these issues now you ask? This is a selection criteria piece, not crystal ball gazing or a rant about performance. But is it? If we look at the obvious criteria such as your supplier having: a rapport with your industry needs, a commercially sensitive design team, and a flexible but robust development approach – what are we left with? Quite a lot actually!

Considering the above issues, you’re going to need access to a proven methodology for planning success, an intuitive approach to user needs analysis, ongoing support by someone who ‘gets it’, proactive encouragement to understand emerging technologies, targeted digital marketing assistance, performance monitoring, and auditing of site structure and content strategies. On top of this you’re going to need to work with someone that not only ‘looks forward’ but ‘leans forward’.

Consider innovation in the context of the ever changing landscape of the online world – it’s hard work. Innovation in our view should be a part of the supplier’s culture. Innovation should be something ingrained in their every move; planning for the future whilst also creating it.

Do you now think differently about the selection criteria of your new project or existing web asset? I hope so. Don’t forget your budget will need to be reflective of the ongoing nature of the investment too.