Website Design Process

Once upon a time…

I’ve been building websites for a long time. In the mid nineties, AngelFire sparked my interest but I dug GeoCities. By the early 00’s, I was using PhotoShop to slice up comps for placement in GoLive. For what seemed about two weeks, we built entire sites in Flash. In 2007, I was using the Drupal CMS to build functional sites that acted more like web applications than brochures. WordPress arrived on the scene around 2009 and I loved the marriage of function and form. Over time, technology changes, design trends change, devices evolve, and users have become more empowered than ever with online editors.

Present Day

Today, average users can head to an online editor and built out a half-decent site in a week. Sites like Wix and Squarespace have made layout and design relatively painless… But that’s only like deciding the color to paint the house. There is a lot of work, science, research, and development that goes into building a medium to large scale website that many users don’t know or understand.

A year or two ago, my organization considered redesigning our public website. Though my former employer ultimately chose to outsource the project, I used the opportunity to take our website through redesign, start to finish. To redesign the website, I began by studying the design document. Once I understood the strategy, audience, and user challenges, I developed four user personas and walked each through the website to identify pain points.

Contents

1. Design Document
2. Developing User Personas
3. Journey Maps
4. Style Guide and Assets
5. Website Flowchart
6. Storyboards
7. Usability Testing
8. Testing Analysis
9. Recommendations and Conclusions

Please note: This assessment was conducted for educational purposes.

Design Document

When working with the website, many users can be heard muttering comments of frustration under their breath. Comments like “Where is IT?!” and “What does that even mean?” are indicative of the user’s poor experiences.

Overall, the mission of the website is to convey information. The charge of the webmaster should be to help users post information and have seekers retain information from the site.

Purpose and Goals

Websites with poor usability ratings prevent the access to and retention of information. The purpose of this experiment is to provide UX designers with actionable items to improve the usability of the website. The result will be a better designed site that will allow users find, access, and retain information better than what is currently available.

Start at the Top: Primary Navigation

The current website consists of over 122 navigation links, 14 of which are in the header of the site. Since many current users complain about not being able to find content, the menu structure should be streamlined into a more user-centric model. Using information provided by Google analytics, the site menu can be pared down to just four links and two icons without much loss in functionality.

Why this Solution?

Due to being a state agency, cost is the deciding factor. Any project with a projected cost over $300 must be bid out requiring request for proposals (RFPs), limited talent pool of only North Carolina businesses, and other constraints. This solution will require minimal additional work and can be completed by in-house staff during normal job duties.

Target Audience

From the Google analytics user data, we know that the primary users of the website are English speaking North Carolinians from the Charlotte and Triangle areas. While he/she might use any web browser, the traffic is split between desktop and mobile operating systems indicating a mobile audience. Therefore, the challenge will focus on a desktop navigation solution while considering mobile applicability.

Next: Developing User Personas >>>