User-centred design for small business

— Published October 9th, 2007  |  by David Moore

Reading some of the canonical texts of user experience - Morville and Rosenfeld'sInformation Architecture (aka 'the polar bear book'), or Jesse James Garrett's Elements of User Experience, say, you'd be forgiven for thinking that user-centred design (UCD) only really mattered for large websites and large organizations.

Those books have information on how to persuade your boss that user-testing is a good idea, material on establishing strategy for a dysfunctional company division, and many examples of how big ecommerce sites do things.

And it's true that the challenges of designing a successful user experience are writ large on multinational or government department sites - indeed, it's where we at iQ Content spend most of our time. But the benefits of a well-planned site are just as important (and easier to attain) for small businesses and non-profits.

5 tips for getting UCD into small projects

From several years of planning and building smaller sites along UCD lines, I've come up with some tips for implementing user-centred design practices on small projects.

1) Show clients some bad sites
Even people who spend a lot of time on the internet don't always know how to 'read' sites effectively. They'll notice the Flash intro screen, but not notice how annoying it is when all you want is to get to the company's phone number.

So sit down with them and talk them through why a bad site doesn't work, and then show them why a well-planned site makes everything easier - it's a valuable lesson.

2) (Politely) tear up their documents
Some clients do a lot of work before they call you, sometimes producing detailed plans and site structures. Most of the time, these aren't worth very much. They are based on assumptions that need to be examined, and reflect a few of the organization's objectives, with little attention to user requirements.

It can be a hard sell to persuade the client that you really need to start over, but it can help to ask few pointed questions to highlight the gaps in their plans - even, 'What are the main audience groups you're aiming at, and what do we know about them?' can show they really need to do some more work.

3) Talk to the users
Full-blown audience research projects are often beyond the resources of many small sites, but even 30 minutes with real users can be invaluable.

A recent project of mine for a private secondary school was greatly improved by talking to parents of current students. They made it very clear what really mattered to parents (who'd have guessed the lunch menu would be so popular?), and revealed a clear difference between the needs of new parents and those of parents whose children had already been at the school for a year or two.

4) Good navigation can create a little gem
If the volume of content isn't that great, it's possible to create a site that works almost effortlessly for a user. This doesn't mean it's easy, but with fewer buckets of content to worry about (and fewer political factions at work), there's more freedom to focus on what really matters in site structure and navigation.

But there'll still be visitors you search every site they come to, so even for a small site, adding a search feature can reap dividends.

5) Not everything's rosy
OK, this isn't really a tip - more a warning. Working on a small project means a user-centred approach can have more impact more quickly than on larger projects with more inertia and competing inputs. But that doesn't mean it's a piece of cake.

The first challenge is that the client won't see the point of doing this extra 'thinking work' when to them it's obvious what the site should be and do (see point 1 above). The 'Show Me' drive can be stronger when the team is tiny and the client's already written all the content.

Another issue is that resources can be very tight, so adding an extra three of four pages or some extra planning time can be a real issue.

The technological experience of clients is often less than when you're working with a dedicated IT team. If the client doesn't know what an RSS feed is, or why accessibility is even an issue, you might have more of an evangelising role to play.

That said, the results can be impressive for very little extra work. When it comes to websites employing user-centred design principles, small really is beautiful.