Performance Design
Function vs. Form - a dichotomy in almost any creative process. This is a healthy exercise when it comes to designing high performance website layouts. Our process was developed through years of primary market research. Founder, Brad Holland and lead business analyst, has lead website focus groups in order to optimize the performance of the design layer of his websites. Working with expert web designers is always a balance. An iterative creative process that builds on the functional fundamentals of the layout tactics is critical.
Research Driven Process
A focus group is a powerful, yet expensive, method for analyzing user behavior on websites. This consists of inviting target market profile users to attend a primary market research exercise. This type of research is a mind opening experience for website owners, designers and business analysts. What takes place is fairly simple. 10 to 20 attendees who represent your market attend a several hour long lab exercise. Each individual is assigned a laptop that is running tracking software that logs and times mouse and keyboard events. The users are presented with a webpage and given a brief list of exercises to perform on the website. An example could be as simple as, 1) How much does the primary product cost? Sounds simple enough, right? What you think would happen, isn't always the case. The attendees are viewing your homepage and the exercise leader begins the case. Behind one-way mirror, the consulting team observes the event. Logically, you would assume that everyone would click on the "Products" link, then "Product Details" and view the primary product cost. Users are all different, some click on FAQ, others click on a photograph that leads to a page showing the product in use, some click a link and the back button and continue a trial and error approach to finding information they are looking for. Even putting a link on the homepage "Primary Product Cost" doesn't work for the majority in the session. All of this is timed and we get the bell curve. On average it took all of the users 19.6 seconds to find out how much your primary product cost. There is always the savvy individual, rolling his/her eyes wondering why they agreed to come in and perform ridiculously easy tasks, for only $250. And there is everything in between savvy and an individual who never did find the product cost and ran out of time. Once the exercise is over, some notes / comments are exchanged, being recorded of course. We ask the attendees what they did and why.
Once the session is completed, we load up a different homepage / website for the same company and repeat the session with changes made from the compiled reports rendered from the first round. This enables the analyst to recommend efficiency changes to the design and the designer aesthetically gels the changes into an attractive layout. The session repeats and now the same simple task average completion time is 9.68 seconds for the group. Still not good enough. Further enhancements are made, sometimes a drastic change and another session. This performance testing cycle repeats until the majority of all users can find an answer to a question in a few seconds and their comments are all positive. "This was very easy, I wish it was this easy when I am trying to buy a book on Amazon.com" one attendee might say, for example. The goal is to apply fundamentals of our research to design characteristics.
Once all of the primary research is completed and a refined version of the website design is completed, we take all of the versions to the client organization and hang them on a board and get their input. The COO points to layout #2 and says "I like that one the best", and provides some feedback. Another executive chooses #3 with comments. Following the client engagement phase, we present the reports and show which layout the most people chose as being favored, initially, from a purely aesthetic standpoint. Then we break out the metrics of user testing and show which design performed the best. Typically, the most favored looking and highest performing aren't the same.
This is a hallmark of our website design. Bringing in performance as the #1 priority and aesthetics as a very close #2. Looking clean, attractive lines and color pallet are important. Your website enabling users to quickly and easily find the information they are looking for is critical. High user performance is embedded into our website designs. An attractive presentation that communicates the characteristics of your company identity, delivering quality information in a non-intimidating format that presents actions to a user while driving conversion is the ultimate goal. This takes a combination of aesthetic appeal and true research driven fundamentals applied to the website characteristics and design properties.
Your website needs to perform for the majority of your user profiles. This is done by carefully profiling visitors, asking a lot of questions and reviewing research data. Focus groups are time consuming and expensive, however having lead this type of primary research, our analysts have the expertise in designing an effective designs that look great and deliver a rich user experience.