If you are a business owner, sales and marketing manager or IT manager, the chances are you have become very familiar with your website. Whether or not you find your website clearly structured and understandable, the ultimate judges will always be its end users – your customers, prospects, partners, and employees. A website that is considered friendly by its users is considerably more likely to fulfill its marketing/sales potential and bring in new business.
A number of guidelines for creating user-friendly websites exist; we summarized these for you with a focus on international business in our ebook 15 tips for a user-friendly website in Europe.
However, even the best designers that follow all user-friendly guidelines can design a website that is not found to be user-friendly by its end user. This happens for a simple reason – the guidelines are always general, but your end users have specific requirements. You need to discover those specific requirements, implement solutions that address them, and test whether those requirements have been met during usability testing.
Identifying user requirements
There is a whole science behind identifying user requirements called requirements engineering, with many helpful analytical and creative time-consuming techniques and methods. This is often necessary when a new and innovative system is being developed, but most small to medium sized companies are looking for a simpler, faster and less resource-intensive solution. So here is a checklist for you:
- Define your personas: A persona is a concrete profile of a typical user. Talk to your website users – customers, prospects, partners, employees – about why they use your website, what they are looking for, what they expect to find there and if they manage to find it quickly and without any problems. Think as your website users – if you know your users well, try putting yourself in their position. Each persona should be rich in details, based on interviews with real people. A persona profile typically includes the following: name, gender, age, job title, background on what they are looking for and goals.
- Scenarios and story-boarding: When your personas are ready, draft a number of scenarios that your persona might go through when visiting your website – placing an order, searching for a specific product information, reaching out to your support staff, looking for your marketing materials etc. At each stage of individual scenarios, consider what difficulties might your persona encounter, what could go wrong, what options does the persona have or typically considers – write this down as a numbered list (list each alternative option as a number point at a lower level) or draw it as a simple cartoon (technique called story-boarding).
- Define requirements: Based on your scenarios, define a list of user requirements that are clearly stated, measurable, and focus on one aspect at a time. Requirements can be simply functional, e.g. “A website shall enable a one-click checkout.” or quality focused – related to websites performance, look and feel, usability, availability, maintenance, security, reliability and other aspects. e.g. “A confirmation email shall be sent automatically to the user in less than 1 minute after an order is placed.” or “90% of users must be able to place an order in less than 4 minutes from the time they landed on a checkout page”.
Subscribe to our blog at the top of the page, you will receive a notification when a follow-up blog is published: “Making your website user-friendly: DIY usability testing for companies”. This blog will outline how to test requirements that you defined and put in place.
