The Web is about self-service. To achieve success in self-service
you need to really understand how your visitors think and behave.
If they are to serve themselves they must feel comfortable and confident.
That requires getting to know their needs in a comprehensive manner.
It requires an ongoing conversation with them.
The phone rang in the office of a McDonalds manager. The manager picked
up the phone. The first thing he was asked was why he was in the office?
Why wasn't he out in the restaurant?
Success in self-service is dependent on an intimate knowledge of how
people behave. In a plush restaurant, there are experienced waiters
to escort you and advise you. In a self-service restaurant, the design
needs to escort and advise you. That requires very careful design
that has a crystal clear understanding of what people want and how
they behave.
On
a day-to-day basis, a web team can get caught up in the pressure of
keeping a website running. Getting out and talking to those visitors
who read the website can seem like a luxury. It is not a luxury. It
is a necessity if you want your website to work well.
If you are a web manager, you need to get out on the floor on a weekly--or
even daily--basis. You need to start watching how people use your
website by initiating usability studies. You need to talk and listen
to people at every opportunity. This will help you develop a 'nose'
or 'gut instinct' for what people want.
This is not a like-to-have option. This is a must-have option. You
simply cannot design and manage a successful website without understanding
your visitors inside-out. This is the heart of self-service design:
knowing people better than they know themselves.
Don't depend on website logs or surveys to get the information you
need. I was told about a study that examined the attitude of a group
of people towards web privacy policies. When surveyed, almost 40 percent
said that they checked these policies when shopping online. However,
when the shopping behavior of these people was tracked over a period
of time, only 4 percent actually did check up the policies.
You'll need to be able to 'read between the lines' of what people
are saying to you. You'll need to train and hone your gut instinct
by repeated interaction with the people you serve.
It's very easy to see the people who come to a website as just a bunch
of statistics. Web teams can become isolated. There can be too much
emphasis placed on technology. This leads to websites that don't work
as well as they can.
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Google knows that understanding how people search is the foundation
for success. Google has more than 10 staff whose fulltime job is reading
and responding to emails from people searching their website. "Nearly
everyone has access to user feedback," states Monika Henzinger, Google's
director of research. "We all know what the problem areas are, where
users are complaining."
Great self-service means making something so convenient that people
don't even have to think. To achieve that sort of classic design you
need a thorough understanding of how people behave in a given situation.
To design great websites you need to know people better than they
know themselves.
About the Author:
Gerry McGovern is a content management consultant, author and speaker.
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com
Read this newsletter at:
http://www.thedevweb.com/2004/0512.html
Iam trying to set up a data source file to
my host server (the server that my website is on??) and this
is the 212. etc IP address. However I am getting the message
that 80. etc Blueyonder (my broadband supplier) denies access.
...
By
Gerry McGovern
