User-Centered Design
Have you ever thought about who you are building your site for, and what they are trying to achieve by visiting the website? If you have, congratulations, there are surprisingly few people who do. But trust us: the best way to build a website is to find out what your users want, and then give it to them.
Building a site for those who are going to use it
The concept of user-centred design takes the usual approach to building websites, and turns it upside down. We think about what a user wants to achieve, and then work backwards from there. Someone wants to sign up to a newsletter? Great - from avoiding password masking to the colour of the sign-up button, what are the best options to get a user to subscribe?
Someone wants to sign up for a class in a school? Fantastic - how can we give the visitor a positive user experience, helping them find the content they want, and encouraging them to interact with the site as well as possible?
Applying science
If the above sounds a bit airy, you'll be reassured to hear it's all backed up with cold, hard science. We adhere to the international ISO 13407 standard, which defines a general process for including human-centred activities throughout the web project life cycle
. That's project management language for helping our visitors do what they want to do, in the most intuitive way possible.
We run focus groups and competitive analysis, we use persona profiles, card sorting, comprehensive site maps, and of course we user-test the site at every stage of the process to ensure that when the website is delivered, users are able to pick it up and use it.
Visiting a site should be like child's play
The greatest praise we get is to hear a user say That was a breeze!
. That's what we aim to achieve with all our sites.
