Sorry there has been no posts earlier this week I am in Cairns this week working on the new website strategies for Adventure Tours Australia, Oz Experience, and Wayward Bus. I have to say they are going to be great when they come out later this year.

I have discussed the importance of planning in so many posts before; but, I just can’t emphasis it enough. It might be very boring, but we have spent a week locked in a hotel room mapping out the content of each site, the path a customer will take to make a purchase, and then the design elements.

Although we still have a long way to go we have followed an interesting methodology. Over the past six months there has been a lot of critical analysis undertaken of the current websites and from that we went into these sessions with a pretty clear bundle of functionality that must be in the websites. From there we started the session by building up some personas with the ideal customers. By identifying how they use the sites and what these customers look for in the websites we began to build up a picture of how the sites should look like. Likewise, we took the list of necessary functionality and applied a funnel process. For those who have not heard my expound the merits of the funnel design process I will write a post about it next week - but basically it involves identifying the real measurable objectives (to sell tours and bus tickets in this case) and then identifying all the functionality that is essential to achieving these objectives. The more important the functionality the closer to the narrow end of the functionality it goes. Suddenly you realise that there is functionality there that does not contribute to the objectives. it is outside the funnel - and therefore it may not be needed in the website at all; in some cases it may distract from the achieving of the objectives or even cause the customer to abandon the website.

Armed with this knowledge we finally got to the fun part of getting some design ideas down on the computer. The idea of all the planning is that the design phase is the easiest - but it’s not! It’s the most emotional and we have had a number of hurdles to overcome nonetheless - but we are underway.

I am taking the plan away to the Xebidy crew not for a few weeks to come back and present the designs back to the ATA team for a review. At this stage the plan is to look at as many different scenarios to see if the first release designs achieve the stated objectives. We will also apply the personas to these scenarios. I will report back.

Tags: Website design

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2007 at 5:34 pm and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.