How to Hone In on a Good User Experience

Website User Experience Questions

Understanding UX before building a website can really help the project come together nicely and with limited to no frustration. User Experience (UX) involves a person’s behaviors, attitudes, and emotions about using a particular product, system or service. When a visitor comes to your website for the first time you want your message to be simple, unobstructed and easy to read and understand on any device.

Failing to plan for your design, and failing to prepare prior to the start of a web development project will only set you up for frustration and failure. It will also frustrate your developers. Believe me, we've been there.

To use an analogy, imagine you are building a house. You meet with your construction team, and they draw up the blue prints. Halfway through building, you decide you really need a bathroom on the third floor, and even though we've built the second floor out, we can just change the flooring to be wood instead of carpet, because that's what we really wanted. Do you think that the builders would get frustrated, and that you would have to pay more for the extra work? That happens frequently in the web development process, but for some reason people seem more shocked that re-coding and redesigning pages, and adding new function to the site will expand the website cost.

That is why a plan and development brief are so, so very important to have before you even begin to code the website.

Here are a few important questions to ask before getting started with planning your website, to help you hone in on the best User Experience for your business:

The User’s Experience

Who is the User?

Explain who the target user is. What do they like? How do the act? What is their intent on visiting the particular page they landed on?

Explain the Problem You’re Solving

If your page has information and you’re attempting to get a message across, let’s think about the User first. Let’s assume the User is trying to solve a problem. What is that problem? How can you prove (and explain) that the User actually has the problem?

Creating the Message

DESIGN CONCEPTS: Provide examples of websites you like the look of, visit these examples with all members of your organization and categorize priorities clearly.

CONTENT CONCEPTS: Write out a perfect example of your message. No links, no images, nothing but words. Provide this writeup to people not familiar with your brand. Create questions in relation to what these individuals understand. Gauge messaging and adapt content strategy.

Taking Action

If you had to pick one action you most wanted the User to do, what is it? Explain the clear call to action on the page. Then, explain why the User would take action.

Mark Your Results

There are two phenomenal aspects to having a website:

1. Explain and Pitch Your Message ALL THE TIME
2. Track Progress (with exact data)

How will we track the effectiveness of the web page and the User’s Experience?

Tracking:

How will people access a page on the website? Is there a testing process in place (to gauge a page’s effectiveness) to test A/B?

User Experience Planning for Your Website

Before you even begin the website build it’s important to create a plan including what you’re looking to accomplish in relation to the User’s Experience on your website. This falls in line with something we’re all familiar with: If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Provide a Website Development Brief

Often times the project brief doesn’t get the attention it deserves. To avoid miscommunication and conflict it’s best to iron out each and every knowable detail before work on a website build begins. The project brief (if done right) will be the most valuable reference for the organization’s management team and the design and development team you’re hiring to build-out your project. Never rush through this phase of the website quote process.

It may seem as though this process is time consuming and difficult, we can assure you, it’s worth every minute. This outline will help you communicate your hopes and needs. It will also allow your design and development team to catch missed items and possible conflicts while compiling a clear outline of requests, objects and goals.

In order to provide a guideline for discovery, bold items are essential to providing a brief to Spark Logix Studios. While ALL elements are useful, the bold text is highly important in gathering detail for the project build.

The Organization

1. The Purpose and Mission of the Organization
2. The Purpose and Mission of the Website (What’s the website’s role/objective?)
3. Services and Products Offered
4. The History of the Business
5. Are there branding guidelines to follow? Provide all branding documents in detail. Explain all requested branding guidelines to adhere to on the website. Include: logo, color schemes and all other notable branding detail.

Target Audience

1. Where do your prospects live (geographical area)?
2. How do your prospects currently find your product/service?
3. Explain in detail your target audience.

Project Management

1. Who are the decision makers?
2. How is a final decision made, approved and submitted?
3. How frequently does the organization need updates on build progress?
4. Will there be meetings requested by the organization? How frequent and in what format? What is expected?
5. How are disputes to be handled?
6. Will the decision maker &/or project manager be available for communication via Basecamp throughout the week?

Project Background

1. How many developers (teams) have worked on this particular project? Were there issues? What were those issues?
2. Are there any third parties assisting in this development? Who? What will be their role and how will they communicate?
3. How long has this project been active?

Content

All Pages

1. Complete Sitemap (all pages)
2. A list of all current pages
3. A list of all newly requested pages
4. Top Level Navigation (including all levels of dropdowns in list format)
5. Are there 301 re-directs and newly requested URLs for existing pages? Please list all.
6. (from Design Requests: label groups of pages that will include the same design layouts)

Pages (Written Content)

1. Which pages will keep the exact content?
2. Which pages will require modified content?
3. Which pages will require completely new content?
4. What content needs to be written? Include: each page requested, expected word count and if it’s (modified content, all newly written content) | Who will write it? Will they indicate the H1 and H2’s (and so on)?
5. Will the Title Tags and Meta Descriptions need to be re-written? Who will write them?

Images

1. Which pages will keep all of the exact images?
2. Which pages will require new images?
3. Who will be providing the images?

Site Functionality

1. Define the exact functional elements of the website (If there are functionalities more so than a User reading text on a page it should be notated in vivid detail.)
2. Define the User’s experience. Showcase typical User flow (sometimes visuals help). What happens? What’s accomplished? List each unique User experience and specify their exact functionality flow.
3. Will content be provided via XML or CSV?
4. Explain all integration needs with third parties and expected server compatibility.
5. Are there specific forms to be used? How many? Where? What fields? Any conditional logic? Who receives correspondence or confirmation?
6. Are there specific WordPress plugins to be used? What are they? What’s their purpose?
7. Where will the site be hosted? What is the Developer’s responsibilities in relation to hosting?

Design Requests

The items included consist of the client’s use of websites they like and how they’d like to modify those designs to fit their vision. It’s important to highlight the design requests for the following sections of the site:

1. Header/Preheader (Top of Page and Navigation Design and Function)
2. Body Concept (Design and Function of Homepage)
3. Footer / PreFooter (Bottom of Page Design and Function)
4. Internal Page Concepts (Design and Function of Internal Pages) -How many internal page layouts will there be? List the needs of each and group together (as listed in the Content section).
5. Color Palette/Scheme (as indicated in the Organization list).

eCommerce (if applicable)

1. Explanation of products or services to be sold online.
2. Product Content (manual data entry, CSV, XML, another source). Who is expected to load the products and all content related to products (written content, images, attributes, price variations, titles, meta, etc)?
3. What configurations will be needed? Attributes, Variations, Shipping, Tax Scenarios, Payment Portals, etc.
4. Explain the shop experience in detail. What is expected? Define the User flow in detail.
5. Detail your plans for security including SSL or off site payment processing.
6. What reporting methods are expected? Indicate reporting needs in detail.
7. Include terms and conditions of purchase.

Testing and Revisions

1. What is expected to be tested and under what conditions?
2. In addition to the Development Firm, who else is expected to test functionality?
3. When will testing take place and for how long?
4. Changes and revisions in relation to testing: Who is responsible? How is it paid?

Project Schedule

1. Specify all deliverables and milestones for the Development Team.
2. Specify all of your deliverables and milestones.

I know that seems like a lot. It really is! But these are all questions that have to be answered during the website development process. If you have answers to these questions from the start, you can ensure that you will end up with a website you love, at a cost you are expecting. If not, I can guarantee you will have a headache, and a messy site you are unhappy with.

As the Scouts say, "Be Prepared"!