A strategy that puts the user in control at the centre of things is, according to Zabisco director Hammad Khan, the principal benefit of a user-centred approach.

Have a conversation with almost anybody and most would agree that making your end-users perspective a leading factor in how you approach your business makes sense. So why is it that when you look closely, so many businesses (and non-profit organisations and public bodies for that matter) don’t actually adopt this seemingly obvious idea?

Taking ‘The user’s point of view’ doesn’t have to be quite as opened ended as it sounds. The idea of User Centred Design (aka UCD) is a well-established practice; it even has an ISO standard (ISO 13407), so your managers can be confident of implementing it into existing business process. When I’ve been asked to come into an organisation and get them to start taking a UCD approach to a project, we’ve found it to be one of the easiest change management practices to go through, as it’s driven by common-sense as opposed to other methodologies that rely on a decision making process that not everybody agrees on. Of course, it also delivers the best user experience at the end and that is no bad way to create a closer and more engaging relationship with your customers.

User Centred Design is not just about ‘blue-sky thinking’ over what people might want (which can be dangerous in its own right as opinion quickly becomes fact during internal brainstorms). UCD encourages the inclusion of your target audiences in the process. Requirements capture, prototyping, revision cycles, testing and ongoing feedback – almost every part of a project’s lifecycle is an opportunity to include your users into the process and keep things focused in their favour.

The result is that you and your team are collaborating, rather than competing on how to drive out your business goals more effectively; with the end users being the grounding voice throughout. All those well established business mantras like ‘the customer is always right’ exist for a reason, so adopting UCD allows us to pay homage to this, while being realistic at the same time.

One way to quickly see how much UCD influences a company’s outward facing communications and services is of course by looking at its website. Being a digital agency, this is something we analyse and implement regularly. How a business chooses to label and organise its content and the navigation around it is often a good indicator as to how much the end users have been taken into consideration and whether this has been given preference over the needs of the business itself.

Those taking an inside-out view will often have their navigation and calls to action reflecting how their organisation is structured; its departments, locations and sales contacts. Conversely, organisations who have taken a more user-centred perspective are more likely to have a navigation that better reflects the needs of their audience; how they can help, softer language etc.

Crosshead: Good intentions

So, why is it so many businesses don’t get this right? Is it because they don’t care about their customers? That’s not often the case. Projects often start with good intentions, but the user’s needs and viewpoints get overshadowed by politics and personalities. Working in corporate web design and development, this is a pattern we come across regularly and it’s easy to see how it can occur.

In a typical organisation, there are usually competing groups vying for the space, prominence and functionality that meet their specific needs: a marketing department wanting to push the latest product line for example; the CEO wanting to communicate the new strategy; or the Finance team needing to publish reports. Each a valid business need, but ultimately serving that of the organisation first, rather than what their audience needs.

This internal struggle also comes with political connotations and in extreme cases can even get personal. Seldom does one group or department back down in favour of another in a ‘straight up’ fight. By using UCD as the methodology throughout, it’s a lot easier (and quicker) to get the compromise needed, as everybody knows up front that if a particular feature, function or requirement isn’t high on the audience agenda it can be re-thought.

Similarly if the terminology used for navigation isn’t driving the user to their goal, then it can be re-architected. An instant business benefit of taking this approach is to getting a better return on investment (ROI) from your pay per click advertising on sites such as Google or Bing. Why waste money on bringing traffic to your website, if people will get lost, confused and ultimately leave before fully engaging with what you had to offer? This kind of optimising is something we do a lot of and it doesn’t always have to come attached to a big redesign project either.

To give an example, getting the balance right can be as simple as promoting a product’s benefits instead of listing its features; a subtle difference, but one that engages in a totally different way. Clearly thought out benefits can inspire somebody to think about how a product or service fits with them as an individual. Defining features relies on the hope your market can find a connection with it. In a world that is ever more competitive and sceptical, the question is – why risk it?

In website design (or more accurately, information architecture), one of the most common patterns we see is clients who want to know why a navigation structure that that looks similar to example A below is not working well for them (ie low traffic, poor sales, high drop-out rates etc):

About us | Products | Services | Partners | News | Contact us

Simple enough and not wrong in any tangible way, but actually this speaks volumes about how the organisation thinks – pretty much about themselves predominantly! By looking at these choices, the user is not educated about what’s on offer or whether the information they are after is even available.

Let’s apply this to a fictitious business as an example – say Acme Watches. If a potential customer came along looking for the latest prices, would they be in ‘products’? Maybe, but what if Acme Watches doesn’t sell direct to the consumer and you have to find an authorised reseller (which happens to be inside ‘partners’). The user might search around and find the appropriate content they need, but more than likely they’ll switch off, or turn back to Google for a new and more obvious direction.

If however Acme Watches got the team together and brainstormed on how to better communicate their proposition, they may have come up with something like example B:

Who we are | What we do | How we can help | Who we work with | Get in touch

If however, they adopted UCD and took both internal and external perspectives, they’d more likely end up with something not too different from example C.

About Acme Watches | Mens’ Watches | Ladies’ Watches | Repairs & Servicing | Where to buy

Again, a small change, but a huge difference when it comes to keeping users engaged. I’m sure I don’t need to patronise by spelling out the improvement, but if you know of a sceptic and fancy making a quick few quid, put these examples through some A/B testing and put your money on C!

www.zabisco.com