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Four
Design Tips for Increasing Web Site ROI |
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By Joe Natoli, Founder, Natoli Design Group (Published November 8, 2004) When you're looking to develop a new Web site, refurbish an old one or update existing content, there are four guidelines you should follow to prevent lackluster results and underperformance in terms of ROI. 1. Focus on understanding users Take time to develop customer "personas" to guide the design effort. Maybe you have one specific type of customer who wants specific things; maybe you have multiple purchasers who want different services or products. No matter what the case, creating a persona for every type of customer you have keeps you squarely focused on serving the most important goals of your most important customers. You'll see the result of this almost immediately -- in shorter design cycles and improved site quality. 2. Adopt a scenario-based approach Customers and prospects arrive at your site with specific goals in mind. Because of this, your job is to create quick, clear paths to content and functions that satisfy those goals. The key here is to design, build and test sites for these actual "user scenarios"; in other words, the site's form and function should match the site user's intent. For example: How long does it take to get from making a buying decision to finishing up an actual purchase? Your site should make key tasks easy and intuitive to accomplish. 3. Cultivate design smarts among your team Everyone involved in the design process -- from HTML coders all the way up to the CEO -- should know who the site’s users are, and what the most critical goal of each user is. Every person even remotely involved with creating or updating the site, should be able to draw a straight line from business goals (like generating qualified leads) to corresponding user goals (like choosing the right product and then finding a dealer who sells it). You must be able to defend content, navigation and presentation decisions based on how well they support these user scenarios. 4. Exercise project discipline When looking to design or retool an existing site, focus on the flaws with the highest impact on the customer FIRST -- and then test and optimize these fixes. Make sure any (and every) change you make is focused on your customers, and continuously revisit those changes to ensure they support the site’s overall goals. Follow these tips during your next content update or redesign project,
and you will most definitely see an increase in ROI. Joe Natoli is the founder of Natoli Design Group (NDG), a full-service communication design firm specializing in brand strategy, marketing communication and graphic design for print and web-based initiatives. He firmly believes that great design results in happy customers, fatter margins, shorter price wars and major return on investment dollars. Drop him a line at jnatoli@natolidesign.com, or visit NDG at www.natolidesign.com.
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