Articles

Customer Focused Design

Last summer the BBC online ran a detrimental story about the Odeon website; apparently the site so infuriated cinema goer Matthew Somerville that he built his own 'accessible' version that met W3C and DDA guidelines. Although his was an extreme response, the disgruntlement, disenchantment and sheer frustration felt by many customers of supplier websites is very common.

The news coverage of the accessible website generated more applauding visits. The Odeon legal team responded by sending Matthew a letter that led to the shut-down of his accessible site. What is notable from this cautionary tale is that not only did Odeon botch their site’s design by singularly ignoring their customers but that their brand suffered unnecessary flak as a result of their failure.

There are plentiful examples of other websites that fail to deliver what their customers expect and consequently provide a poor user experience. A likely cause of these letdowns is an initial lack of customer understanding during the website development project and a consequent failure to produce any method of validating the website against customer needs both throughout the project and once the website has gone live.

The idea that by knowing your customer you can deliver a website experience that will increase their appreciation, leading directly to bottom line benefits is called Customer Focused Design. This sounds great, but the question is how does one go about developing a customer focused design and then test to make sure it works?

There are many ways of getting to know your customers and the size of a budget will dictate the methods available. We have found that the best and most cost effective methods of testing website design and functional assumptions are through the use of ‘Personas’.

In 1999 an American called Alan Cooper wrote a book called ‘The Inmates are running the asylum’ which popularised the use of Personas to aid design teams in the production of customer focused work. Personas are individual user profiles of target customer segments developed from customer research.

Alan felt that the use of personas would allow a development team to live and breathe the user’s world and filter out personal quirks and focus on motivations and behaviours typical of a broad range of users, whilst still relating to users as individuals.

We’ve used Personas on a number of projects over the last few years with increasing success, the problems that we encountered during early projects were that the Personas were too broad; because the character was made up, assumptive and with little user research to support them. Since those early days we’ve learnt that Personas need to be tested against quantitive research such as site stats, survey results and qualitative research including talking to clients in-depth about their individual customers. The best Personas put a believable character against a range of behaviour patterns.

What we’ve found is that we didn’t need Personas solely for the purpose of creating empathy and filtering out peculiarities but were looking for a means to:

• Provide the most appropriate and accessible interface
• Provide guidance on product positioning
• Enable better information architecture decisions
• Help identify success criteria and project audit ability

Time consuming though it may be, we feel it is important to delve creatively into the development of a set of believable characteristics for Personas; it is only through this that we can extrapolate our work to say “What would X do if this were the case?” and to make accurate judgements on what they are likely to do.

From our experience we’ve found that for Personas to work they must provide the following:

Task Understanding – Clearly cataloguing what they are looking for from the website relationship, i.e. “I want to be able to find information on my investment funds and make appropriate changes dependent upon that information”. The task description says what the customer wants to do, but not how he or she would accomplish it. Understanding tasks is important because customers are only prepared to put up with so much before they'll walk away.

Technology Understanding – By appreciating how a customer accesses the Internet, their tools and limitations it is possible to modify designs to optimise the delivery of the website. For example if customers have broadband access or access the web via a PDA or other device, if they use the Firefox, Safari or Opera browser, whether they have pop-ups disabled and Flash or Java installed will have a dramatic impact on the user experience. Although they should never be the driving factor, technological constraints should still be considered as a critical part of the web design mix; people and tasks first, technology second (DDA and W3C Guidelines not withstanding)

Social and organisational background understanding – Framing how people, tasks and technology operate within a broader social and organizational framework means putting things into the context of the big picture.

Consideration of other websites they visit – Although this could be bundled under 'technology' we feel it's important enough to be highlighted separately. Although customers may use sites because they are compelled to, it is important to review a range of other websites to gain an insight into navigational and architecture tendencies.

Conclusion

Customer focused design helps avoid potentially disastrous user experience issues and makes a measurable impact on the bottom line performance of a website. By understanding customers, their tasks, technology and social background it is possible to deliver interface and functional designs that they will find more intuitive and engaging.

Creating Personas helps to understand what a customer is doing and why they are doing it. Using Personas at every stage of the project and subsequently when the site has gone live provides an essential and low cost means of validating conceptual work and testing assumptions. Any number of Personas’ can be created for a website and their inter-relationship and relative importance dependent upon the customer segments that are to be targeted.

Lastly, it’s essential to recognise that a Persona is not a fixed post on which to tether a website’s design, like real people they need to transform and mature to reflect the shifting characteristics of real customers and the marketplace in which the website operates.

Author Details: Christopher Johns is the Commercial Director of Aardvark Media Limited. 38 Years old. He has worked in the digital marketplace for over 11 years.

Company Details: Aardvark Media is a digital agency with a technical focus. Established in 1996 it has relationships with companies both large and small for the delivery of their internet strategies. Clients include Siemens, International Private Equity Services Limited, Generali International, Squaremeal, Institute of Trade Mark Attorneys, Novus Leisure and the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants.

For more information on this article or Aardvark Media, please contact us on+44 (0) 20 7582 7711.

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