Content! Content! Content!

1. Understand your users’ goals. Meet those goals. i.e. understand their “conversations”, answer their questions.
2. Enable “Grab and Go”
3. Enable quick, easy finding of information.
4. Improve SEO

Planning: Purposes, Personas, Conversations

• Start by answering: what does the client want. And then help them get there as quick / efficiently / easy as possible.

• Users are different. Web developers are not the average user.

1. Gather Information about Site Visitors

• Allow for easy feedback / contact us.
• Analyze search logs.
• Watch users use your site.

2. List Groups of Visitors

a. Tourists, Healthcare profiessionals b. Builders, Business Owners, Professional Estimators

3. List Major Characteristics of Each Group

• key phrases
• experience, expertise
• emotions
• values
• technology (i.e. are they paying for an unlimited connection, do they have broadband etc., are they on phones etc.)

4. Understand the Conversations they Want to Start

• Don’t translate (if you’re lucky enough to hear their words).
• Analyze site searches.
• What do they want to do? What are their purposes?

5. Create Personas

• i.e. use photos, and real life information to create personas about people, their demographics, emotions, values, etc. so you can develop a site which caters for their eneds.

6. Once you have personas: create scenarios for them

Write and understand their scenarios:

e.g. Freddie is a busy estimator. He wants to find a take-off report showing quantities, quickly.

• First he has to find the report.
• Then he needs to make sure the report will give him what he wants.
• If there are many reports, he will only want to see the ones he can trust.
• Thirdly: can he trust the MTO estimator. What happens if they give him incorrect results?

These are complicated problems, and your solution must solve these problems according to real life scenarios. The closer your solution matches the majority of the scenarios, the better the prospects of success.

Interlude 1: Content Strategy

• Align your content with your goals.

Designing for Easy Use

1. Design from real data. Not Lorem Ipsum. This improves the quality of your designs. You may need the ability to pull data from the cloud in order to do this.
2. Build for universal flexibility: i.e. allow for text sizes to change, for different colors, and for color blindness, keyboard options, voice and more.

Colors:

a. Work with your brand colors.
b. ...
c. keep backgorund clear.
d. use high contrast (otherwise hard to read).

Space

a. start with mobile first (because space is limited, and design decisions must be made).
b. create consistent patterns.

(Bookmark: pg. 55 - Page 84 of 369).