Needs Based Design

By Paul Boag
Posted Sunday, September 26, 2004

Find out how your website should meet the needs of your users rather than your internal staff or web design company.

A lot of people have talked about needs based design, but given the number of terrible sites out there (almost all of them), the message clearly hasn't gotten through.

Case studies

SmarterKids.com has a great home page. Instead of wasting real estate on merchandising that's not interesting to most people, it uses its home page to guide users into the section of the site that will be most helpful in filling their needs. The home page uses the left hand column to ask how old your child is. Based on that first click, you're whisked to product areas geared toward your child. This is in stark contrast to sites that organize products by catalogue numbers or internal company structure. Other sites would put all board games, for instance, in the same category. In fact, eToys.com doesn't even have a "Board Games" category. I found Monopoly through a search but no way to browse for it. A parent would have to sift through plenty of products and figure out individually which are intended for children of a specific age. By organizing products by categorisations most useful to visitors (themes such as "Pretend Play" or "Construction"), SmartKids.com helps customers get to products faster and makes its site seem more personalised than it actually is. As an aside, if you do want to register at SmarterKids.com, it's easy. One optional checkbox that really amuses me says, "My child is talented and gifted." Who doesn't check this box? People who think their kids are stupid?

The Missing Link

Take a good, hard look at your navigation. Most companies organise their sites by product line or service type. That's fine if your users understand everything about the organisation of your site. But I'll bet you a lot of money they don't.

Try the following experiment:

1. Pick a page on your site with a lot of navigation on it (secondary or tertiary navigation, not just the main navigation bar of your site).
2. In the content area of the page, put a little box. We'll call this the "needs-based box."
3. In the needs-based box, put short statements or questions that anticipate what most likely brought the user to that page. On the "About Us" page, for example, the box might list items that can be found in that area of the Web site, such as, "How do I know you are reliable?" and "How much do you cost"
4. Next, try to imagine what the user was trying, but failed, to complete a task and that his failed attempt led him to the current page instead of the correct page. In the needs-based box, add items that are not in that page's category. Continuing with our example, you might put, "What is your phone number?" and "Do you operate overseas, too?" (In our example, those items might actually be in the "Contact Us" area, not the "About Us" area.)
5. Put five or six links in the "needs-based box."
6. Watch your traffic patterns for two weeks. I'll bet you more people follow the links in that box than links in your navigation, even if the box's links go to the same place as the navigation links.

Very important to note is these questions and statements are not just the site's categories and labels turned into sentences. In fact, that is to be avoided. Making "About Us" into "I want to know more about you" doesn't work. You must figure out the user's need. "About Us" might instead turn into "I need to talk to a human" and "Are you hiring?" What pages should you try this technique on? Look at your Web analysis software to find the most common "exit" pages. These are the pages people view right before they lose interest and leave your site. Try to figure out what people might have wanted to do on those pages they were unable to. Put up a needs-based box, then watch your site traffic. If done correctly, those pages will stop appearing on the list of your highest exit pages. Let me know how you make out.

About the Author
Paul Boag [ Director ]
H E A D S C A P E
Web: strategy, usability, design, development, marketing.
(www.headscape.co.uk)
t: 02392 432 829 | m: 07760 123 120

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