Zanka Consulting

Web Performance Measurement and Improvement

You are here: Home / Archives for web design

web design

By

7 Steps for developing a Persona for a Website Redesign

by Peter de Gosztonyi

As part of the Govcamp exercise that I participated in on June 1 2010, one of the sessions the question of using persona’s came up. See the discussion.  Although it can be a complex undertaking, in many instances a quick development process can be very useful as an enabler in understanding a user of an application. This process is specifically used for a website redesign but can be adapted for any use.

Step 1.    Review Desired Business Objectives

  • Describe the Vision and Mission of your website.
  • Describe the objective or purpose of your website.
  • What are the Business objectives of your website Measures
  • What do you want users to do on your website?

Step 2.    Identify and  prioritize Website Target Users and Stakeholders

Definitions:
Stakeholder is anyone who has a vested interest in the success of the website. Includes employees, management, etc
Target users are your current customers or people you want to do business with.

  • Who are you doing business with?
  • Who is vital to the success of your organization?
  • Why are these stakeholders vital to the success of your organization?
  • Which stakeholders are your target market
  • For your Organization?
  • For your web channel

Step 3.    Research target users using either quantitative or qualitative methodologies. Which type of research methodology is best for you  to complete your understanding of the target user groups:

  • Qualitative
  • Quantitative

Definitions:
Market Research
Is either quantitative, qualitative, or a combination of both. Qualitative and quantitative market research methods each provide different insights into customer behaviour. Normally, research results are more useful when the two methods are combined.

Qualitative research
Is a research method that measures information based on opinions and values as opposed to statistical data. It investigates the why and how of decision making and is typically performed through face to face or other interactive sessions and is not structured in approach, use of small-scale samples or small numbers of observations.

Quantitative research
Is a research method based on collecting statistical data through questionnaires or surveys or similar methods to help researchers determine the public opinion. It measures the what, where and when and typically has little direct interaction with users, use of large samples; results subjected to statistical analysis

Step 4.     Segmentation

Segmentation is the process of dividing a market into distinct subsets (segments) that behave in the same way or have similar needs:

  • Look at data gathered for each target user group
  • Look for trends or natural groupings
  • Group brainstorming session
  • For each grouping identify
    • Goals
    • Behaviors
    • Attitudes
  • Regroup based on findings ( between 3 to 6 groups)
  • Establish segment based on the above groupings
  • Rank Segments
    • Primary, secondary,  unimportant
  • Test Segmentation
    • Does this meet your business objectives?
    • Match expectations?

Step 5.    Develop Scenarios based on each Persona

  • Set the scene
  • Establish the goal or conflict
  • Overcome crises along the way
  • Achieve resolution
  • Reach a solution or conclusion

Step 6.    List Actionable Insights and develop an implementation plan and assign a prime for each action

Step 7.    Do it again

By

Building the Foundation for a successful Social Media Marketing Initiative

by Peter de Gosztonyi

I don’t know about you, but this entire social media wave has at times completely overwhelmed me, the pace at which this whole trend is moving and changing is breathtaking. Yet as a business owner I know that one can’t ignore this and it certainly is not going away, so you have to get on the train or you will be left at the station wondering what happened.

Being a very logical and process oriented individual (OK I admit I am an engineer) , I approached this whole social media thing in a logical, one step at a time, process. What I quickly learned that this is not a linear process, in fact at first glance, anarchy and chaos seemed to be a fitting description of the way things happen.

Of course the most frustrating part is the “all you have to do is …..” recommendations, Even the first step everyone seems to recommend of setting up a “listening post” for your organization or  a Google alert for your key words is not trivial for the first timer. Unless your key words are so unique that they rarely show up, you can expect having thousands of alerts to go through on a daily basis, similarly if you are following lots of tweets and news feeds (RSS) the volume can become unmanageable. Finding and setting up a common feed can also be confusing, so a good social media adviser is a huge time saver. If you are under 30, you’re probably wondering what all the fuss is about, however those of the boomer era are techno immigrants – we didn’t grow up with this stuff so it is sometimes harder to comprehend why one would do certain things. I digress.

After a lot of web cruising and blog reading plus reading books by the thought leaders of our time (Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith is one of my favourites) an underlying theme actually did start to emerge – quite a relief to a logical mind.  This may not be an epiphany to most people but it put everything into context for me.

Essentially your website is the focal point of your marketing efforts; consider it as the hub and social media as well as your traditional marketing as channels bringing interested people to your website. These channels include search engines, links from other sites and thousands of mentions of your organization in the mediasphere.

Of course managing these channels is a challenge and it requires discipline and time management to ensure that your day is not totally caught up in just monitoring the social media channels to the detriment of your business.

What this does mean is that the time has passed when all you needed to do was to put 90% of your efforts towards making your website work well, now you should spend 75% (leaving 25% to your website) of your marketing efforts on building communities of interest, and awareness of your organization in these different spaces that will bring interested visitors to your website. In order to retain their interest and keep them coming back you need to also build a dynamic content rich, collaborative web space.

At the moment, the common belief is that you also need a blog to build relevant content as well as a website which provides the means to convert visitors to customers. This is the foundation that needs to be in place before you really get your social media activities going.

How then do you know if your current website is capable of meeting your social media needs? Perform an audit – have a close look at your organizational objectives and tie them into what you expect your website to deliver to meet these objectives. Then you should analyze your visitor behaviour by looking at your web traffic statistics – assuming that you are not already managing your website through critical business metrics. This establishes your benchmark for comparing the impact of your social media efforts.  There are also a number of other tools such as which websites are linking to yours (backlines), traffic ranking and so on which add competitive information to your arsenal.

What is interesting is that you really don’t have to toss out the old and completely redesign your website, after all a successful organization has built a lot of assets into their websites and customers recognize that value, so it is important to determine what those assets are ( e.g. content) and dispose of those that don’t bring value to your customers or you. That is why a good comprehensive audit is necessary at the onset.

The other key element is to establish effective business measures. These are based on the web statistics ( visits, duration, pages viewed etc) and other inputs ( calls, inquiries, orders, etc)but only the relevant ones are identified as key performance indicators ( KPI’s). These of course need to be linked to your overall organizational objectives. You don’t need many but you need to make sure that they are sensitive enough and relevant to identify trends and patterns so that further investigation can be taken to understand why certain trends are happening so you can take action ( the most important criteria for a metric – will it result in an action that improves your ROI).

Even if you already manage your website this way (congratulations! you would be surprised how many organizations large and small don’t) and knowing that your website will deliver once the word gets out is critical in making your marketing efforts worthwhile. That is why an audit and strategy review is an essential first step – even if you are well on your way with your social media plan, it is a smart move to ensure your website foundation can support your objectives.

 If you have built a solid foundation in your website, then you can turn your efforts in bringing the right traffic to your site and keeping your visitors coming back and building that ever so important relationship.

Peter de Gosztonyi is a long time quality practitioner and web strategist. He spent many years in a customer focused environment which translates well into today’s customer driven websites. His analytic background combined with the customer comes first philosophy yields some interesting insights on what drives visitor behaviour on websites. He is currently a senior associate with Web-Insight.

By

Taking Control of your website – another design myth?

Web design is for professionals – how many times have you heard that? As a small business with limited budgets and lots of competition and minimal expertise with web design, can you really afford a professional web design service and are there better ways to get a professional website on line.

When you scan the Internet the incredible variety and costs are overwhelming. You can find  the $199 website – a highly competitive area in terms of pricing, but caution must prevail – you will get what you pay for. A full professional design for a simple website can cost upwards of $1,000 and more depending upon the effort required by the designer to build the right look and feel as well as a few pages of content for your basic presence. The tough part is knowing what should you spend to get what you really need.

Many people and businesses really just want a website presence or as it sometimes referred to as an online business card or yellow pages listing. For this application what you need is a professional looking easy to manage website with some core features that allow your visitors to complete some key actions that you need them to do. Such as contact you, download information, location and specific web usage information.

One of the biggest mistakes one can do is to not be prepared when you engage a web design company or even more serious is to not dedicate the time to work with the design company to determine what you want the website to do. Guaranteed method of inflating cost, dissatisfaction and delays is to expect the design company to know everything about your business.

Having been involved in numerous small business and association websites over the past 15 years, the most frustrating part was trying to get the client to articulate what they really want and when they see the design it invariably is not what they thought it would be. This iterative cycle is very time consuming and expensive.

Many of the really inexpensive solutions will not do much to help a person develop their website purpose and content. If you do need that, then extra charges could grow open ended as well as occupying your time on the website rather than focusing on your real business.

So what is the solution to building a simple professional website, under your control that doesn’t cost the world and minimizes your time involvement?

The answer is to use a Content Management System being offered by large Hosting companies. We use 1&1 hosting and have had very positive experience with their service. The tools and intuitive user interfaces have come a long way and many of the newest applications out there have very easy interfaces and updating and adding lots of advanced features is very easy.

So far I haven’t really provided any practical or useful information, but hang on – the next posting will help you decide whether you should use this approach or opt for the web designer option, or both.

However the basics of setting up a new website still remain – you need to understand what you want from your website and be willing to spend some of your valuable time to work this through either by a “self help” approach or with a savvy web designer.

By

How to Manage a Website Redesign Project

Website redesign projects don’t have to be a major undertaking, a well organized project with a skilled project manager will plan and implement the project to a well thought out schedule, with the responsibilities to ensure that the project is on time and on budget. Maintaining a full time website project manager within the organization is not normally cost effective, and their responsibilities may include other responsibilities within the website team, which can result in conflicts of interest. While an outside Project Manager has no such vested interests other than to ensure the project gets done.

Team work is critical, as well as knowing when to bring in the right resources to maximize the value each team member brings to the project. For example Zanka Consulting has seasoned facilitators that can guide the team to maximum performance while enjoying the project. Look to the outside (your group or organization) for a facilitator, it doesn’t matter if the person has no knowledge of your industry, actually this is better since the person will not have the urge to contribute, a good sign in any professional facilitator.

Look also for an organization such as Zanka Consulting who can bring considerable experience in web-redesign project management and who will transfer that process and knowledge to your team so that the ongoing maintenance and development will be successful.

Every project will be different so the project manager should work with your team to determine the extent of your needs and design a project plan that will work with your timelines and requirements. All projects follow the basic elements below, a good organization can guide you through part or all of this process, or work with your project manager to build a successful redesign project.

1. Develop a basic plan for the project

  • Project Charter
  • Team members
  • Timeline

2. Vision

  • Review website strategic plan and establish website objectives
  • Perform an environmental assessment
  • User segmentation

3. Discovery –

  • Assess the current website
    • Website audit
    • Website performance analytics ( log files or Google analytics)
    • First Impression analysis
  • Visitor behaviour analysis
    • key words, search terms pages viewed, path to conversion pages, landing pages
  • SWOT (Strength , Weakness, Opportunities, Threats)
  • Competitive analysis

4. Action Plan

  • Develop an action plan
    • Information architecture
    • Website framework/wireframe
    • Performance measures
  • Maintenance plan
  • Ongoing improvement plan

The last 2 steps are usually performed by the web implementation team and the web maintenance team using the project plan and specifications from the previous step.

5. Design and Implement

6. Measure and improve

If you are familiar with project management process, you will recognize the basic elements, but adapted to the web environment. These are tried and true methodologies and they work, taking short cuts will be costly unless you are very sure of what you are doing. That is why professionals in facilitation, project management and web design are critical to your web redesign projects success.

Zanka Consulting specializes in the discovery process and can provide you the data for this analysis in an easy to understand reports to make it easier for you to make the critical decisions as well as save time and money trying to figure out which metrics or programs to use. If you are interested in speeding up your design/redesign process please contact us,)

Copyright 2007-2011 Zanka Consulting

(Zanka Consulting specializes in the discovery process and can provide you the data for this analysis in an easy to understand reports to make it easier for you to make the critical decisions as well as save time and money trying to figure out which metrics or programs to use. If you are interested in speeding up your design/redesign process please contact us.)

By

14 INSIGHTS ON HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR CUSTOMER CONVERSION RATE

1. Websites are intended for people – something that seems to get over looked by developers every once in a while. Large development teams can get so immersed in the application that the original purpose seems to get lost. Silos sometimes are formed based on responsibility and communicating across these silos becomes a challenge. Designing for customers means placing oneself in the position of that person and building the website to meet their needs and objectives.

2. The true measure of a successful website is by the number of visitors who convert into customers. First, a quick definition of “customer” since many websites do not have a shopping cart per se, one must define a customer as a visitor who completes a specific action on the website. This action is a goal of the website, which matches the goals or objectives of the visitor. For example, an informational government site may have a goal to provide information, thus downloads, or visits to a specific page, may be the measure of success.

3. The goals of the website must also correspond to the goals of the target customers. For example if you have a product you want to sell, your goal is to move as much product as possible, whereas the customer goal is to use the product that will benefit them. So in order to meet your goal, you must thoroughly understand your customers’ goals.

4. Minimize your Bounce rate. Google defines a bounce when a visitor only accesses one page and then leaves. When your bounce rate is high, it indicates a potential problem with your website. Visitors can “bounce” at virtually all contact points with your website.

– Search engine Bounce
-Your site gets top ranking but people pass it by
– Referral site bounce
– Advertising or linking from many sites gets little action
· Ad Bounce
– You pay for advertising (e.g. Ad Sense) but get minimal return on your investment – few people access your
site based on these ads.
· Home or landing page bounce
– Lots of one page visitors who land and disappear

5. Optimize your usability. Look at the visiting patterns of your website and try to understand why users aren’t converting. This is best done through a combination of visitor behaviour analysis and usability testing of the site with real users. These include:

– Usability bounce
o Visitors leave after several page views
– Shopping cart bounce
o The most dreadful bounce, the number of people who go through the process of ordering but abandon at
the last step.
· Bounce – bounce
o Those people who leave for random reasons and no matter what you do, would probably not convert.
There is no solution to this category of visitors.

6. People leave at these different contact points because the website did not meet their objective. Trying to answer why the visitors objective hasn’t been met has spawned a huge Internet industry (try Googling “Internet Marketing”!). The primary reason is that they either did not find what they wanted, weren’t ready, or were getting information for comparison or other purposes.

7. Use Google’s free Website Optimizer. This multivariate testing tool presents different layouts of the same page to visitors, allowing you to use the one that converts the most visitors. If you can improve your website so that even a small percentage of visitors actually convert to customers, significant benefits can be had with minimal investment. Sometimes repositioning a heading can have remarkable effects.

8. Ask your customers . Getting real customer feedback is a challenge, although well worth the effort if you can do it. There are several methods to do this see our article on 12 Easy (and not so easy) Ways to get Customer Feedback on your Website.

9. Develop goal oriented persona’s. Persona’s are an excellent way of putting yourself into customers’ shoes and can help your designers to visualize how a visitor will use your website. There is a major difference between user segmentation and segmenting users by goals. The first will produce a significant number of segments, whereas the latter should generate maybe 3 or 4 personas with perhaps one or two more sub personas.

10. Plan your website redesign. Planning is key, most of the hard work is done before any code gets written. The first step is to find out what worked and what needs improvement. The second is to identify the strategic drift between your current website and the direction your organization is going.

11. Identify key performance measures. Understand the performance goals for your website in business terms, then get your web statistics to generate meaningful numbers to measure that success. If you use Google’s Analytics, you can establish goals and ROI based on visitor behaviour.

12. Keep on top of website changes. You can no longer update and ignore your website, competition is fierce and you must be tweaking your website, combining different techniques to improve the performance and looking for major shifts in your market space.

13. Know what your competitors are doing. Periodic competitive comparisons are necessary to see how well you differentiate yourself and also whether you are falling behind on website promotion.

14. Understand your website strategy. Your organization has spent lots of money and resources on the website, knowing how it is positioned relative to the overall corporate strategy will create value not only for the organization but also for the customers. Integrating this channel with other customer channels will also make it easier for the customer and generate value for the organization.