I have been working with companies around the world solve their communication problems. During this time, I never once thought about how I was presenting my own self and what communication problems I was creating. I recently received two separate emails from prospective clients that said almost the same thing. They didn’t understand what I did. Over time, I’ve become my own worse communication problem. As you can imagine, I couldn’t believe these individuals didn’t understand what I did. To be honest, I was a little irritated too, but that was just my ego talking. After putting my ego aside, I began reading through my site. I asked myself questions about what the content was saying to someone outside of the web industry. I realized that these individuals were right. I didn’t even understand what I do anymore.
I needed to fix this problem immediately. Over the next several weeks, I’ll be putting myself through my own user experience audit. I won’t skip any steps in the process either. Just as I would do with a client, I will begin with research, a content audit, and a project brief. I will then create, test and iterate on personas, a series of user stories, run through the core model approach. Finally, I will work put together new content and a new site navigation. This will include the creation of a beta site that I can test with real potential clients.
You might be asking “You’ve mentioned a lot of jargon. What does it all exactly mean?”
Great question. That is one of the first things I’m going to simplify and change throughout the site. One thing I noticed is I use a lot of industry jargon that means nothing to most people. If my own mother doesn’t understand what I do, I’m getting too technical. FYI – she hasn’t a clue what I do. I’m pretty sure she thinks I sell drugs or something crazy like that, which I don’t. Let me discuss exactly what I will be doing.
###The Research
Any project I start for clients starts with an audit of their existing content. Through this audit, I will be looking at many of the details that make each page successful or not. I must understand how potential clients are moving through my site. This will help me develop a solution that direct clients through a funnel that accomplishes my business goals. There are several further techniques I’ll use to test what to keep and what to toss.
I will do competitor benchmarking, an analytic reviews, a usability study and more. The results of these test will help me pinpoint the major friction points.
###The Fun Stuff
One I’ve gathered the research and background information. I will be able to convert the finding into friendlier deliverables. This means that I will create a persona around who I think my ideal customer is. This will help me visualize how to speak to these individuals. Right now, you can’t tell who I’m talking to. Is it small businesses, entrepreneurs or large corporations? Maybe I need to speak to all three or none of these, but only a well-crafted persona will help tell me that.
I will be using the core model method to help determine user tasks and how they match to my business objectives. This deliverable will help determine how the content for each core page should be.
A user story is a breakdown of an individual task/objective that you want your audience to do. A simple example of a task I will have on my site would be as “User(s) should be able to contact me.” This translates into a usable feature like a Contact Me button that opens your email client. The core model takes this a bit further. In the core model, I will look at the core pages I need for my site to best communicate what I do. Each page should allow users to complete defined tasks. On the business side, the page accomplish a business objective like contacting me or signing up for my newsletter. Then writing a rough draft of the content to see if it will deliver on those. Yet, a crucial part of this is the inward and outward paths that users might take. Over the past several years, there has been a drastic decline in the importance of your site’s homepage. The increase in social media, embeddable content and more, users are coming into sites at various degrees of depth. No longer is it a straight forward flow of information. With the core model, I can look at those situations in more detail. I can see how the inward paths affect the content then outward paths to do tasks and business objectives.
###Putting It All Together
At this point, I will be able to put the deliverables together into a usable, functional solution. This solution will be less confusing to prospective clients and solve my own worse user experience problem. I should mention though that none of this ends with just my site. I will need to look at how I’m communicating my brand and services through all touch points. This includes social media, my business cards, emails, and in my personal social interactions. Each touch point that potential clients have with me is a source to consider and evaluated.
With any user experience problem, it is never a one-time fix. I will have to keep a close eye on this, continue to test against my business goals and the accomplishment of user tasks. Iteration is such an important part of any solution. Like any problem, I’ve tackled over the years, there are always new friction points that rise up. Changes in clients behaviors and understanding of my services will continue to evolve. My own goals will change and grow so I must be aware of how future changes will effect my success.
###Further Insights
