Proper visual and structural design is a crucial step in building a site that won’t kill you.
Design gets a bad rap sometimes. It’s expensive, time consuming, not needed—designers create answers that nobody wants to problems that don’t exist…yikes!
We’ve talked with many companies over the years. They’ve ranged from shoestring startups to some big names. No matter what size of company it is, many times there is someone there unwilling to make the investment on design and usability. The main complaint is that the payoff in those areas are not worth the investment.
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As acclimated consumers of the information age, we’ve come a long way from understanding how the blips and lights of the modern personal computer work. We have migrated into an all-encompassing online social grid that seeks to craft the new manner by which we consume, experience, and react to web content. Knowing this about the web, however, is not enough to fill the minds and wallets of those organizations who seek profits today and tomorrow – it takes a larger leap of faith. The key to success for any organization, to sustain a promising future in this post-modern territory, is to manage their website for optimal ROI. How, you may be asking?
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When approaching the development of a new website, project managers, designers, and application developers initially have little data to inform their design decisions and must rely upon research in order to construct successful user experiences. Research, however, is completely invalidated if the decisions it suggests end up being ineffective after a project launches. The fail safe for avoiding such an outcome is extensive usability testing, a portion of the development process many organizations sometimes wish to avoid due to perceived associative costs and resource drain. Usability testing, though, does not have to be expensive or take a prohibitive amount of time, and the changes that will come about due to interacting directly with users will reap benefits that far outweigh any costs in capital or time that is accrued throughout the process.
Keeping usability testing light and cost effective is key, and here are five quick tips on how to do just that:
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