Feature: Effective Websites – the Responsibility of the whole Organisation

Building an effective website is often seen exclusively as the job of the web team, and viewed as a design or technical issue. However, having worked with many different organisations, we would argue that often what stops them improving their website is the organisation itself. Developing an effective website often requires organisational change: it requires a culture where people at all levels in the organisation adopt behaviours that make a ‘good user experience’ an important goal. If the organisation is not focused on providing a good user experience, then the web team will be unable to build an effective website.

Understanding the user experience, through research methods like usability testing, can be a powerful tool in driving the organisational change needed to develop effective websites.

How do Organisational issues affect web site effectiveness?

Three key organisational issues can get in the way of developing effective websites: • Strategic confusion • Organisation not user focused • Distributed content production

Strategic Confusion: It is critical that everyone in the organisation who can affect the user experience has a clear understanding of what the website is trying to achieve – that is: • Who’s the target audience for the site? • What does the organisation want the site to achieve? • What goals do users want to achieve? • Which user goals will the organisation support on the site?

In our experience, strategic confusion rather than strategic clarity is the norm, as these questions have not been answered. Public sector websites are prime examples: the focus of ‘getting a website up’ has tended to be the main objective – without considering what the purpose of the site is and who it’s aimed at. Consequently the site serves the objectives of the content producers – communicating policy that is important to them and the department, but not to other potential users of the site. A major Government department has recently undertaken a complete review and re-launch of its site. Historically, the site has been aimed at all their audiences, both general public and specialist practitioners; however, users have found the site difficult to use, and the general public (who are considered a significant user audience) have found the content of little relevance to them.

As a result of user research, it was concluded that the main site should focus on the general public, with practitioner sites as separate sub sites, rather than trying to service all target audiences together. Consequently, the family of sites can now address the issues relevant to each of the target audiences, with relevant content and information architectures, and this has resulted in significantly increased levels of user satisfaction with the experience.

Organisational focus: Websites are often designed to reflect the internal structure of the organisation. But users don’t care about departments and functions; users just want to achieve their goals, and this is likely to cut across internal structural boundaries.

Organisational staff will be very familiar with how their organisation works; users do not come with this knowledge. So, without a detailed understanding of users, their likely goals, and how they want to achieve these goals, the website will inevitably end up with an organisational rather than user focus. This is seen with both public and private sector websites, where everyone internally is so used to the organisational structure and language that they assume users will also understand the logic. For example, a large multinational organisation has a website which is supposed to be a useful information source for potential investors: however, the site is split into two sections reflecting the organisation’s internal structure, and completely confusing and frustrating relevant users because they can’t quickly and easily get to all the information they need to make the initial case for an investment opportunity.

Distributed content production: If only one person is responsible for producing content for a site, it’s easy to get consistency. However, as soon as several people have this responsibility, the website is likely to become variable in quality and style. This is exacerbated when content providers have a poor understanding of the site strategy and users, and have experience of developing content for print media rather than the Web. In order to have an effective website, these distributed content producers need to understand what information needs to be presented to meet user and organisational goals, and how this needs to be presented to make the site usable. A large government agency maintains a website with content provided by a wide range of contributors within the organisation. The contributors are all experienced in their field, and so ‘know a lot’, but are used to writing internal policy documents; they also want to publish material to demonstrate the value of their part of the organisation. Consequently, much of the content on the site does not address user goals, is not written in a way that is readable and understandable to its audiences, and does not have a consistent style and tone.

Bringing about change

Change often fails in organisations because either it is not focused on the ‘right’ business or organisational issues, or because people don’t change their behaviours in the long term. The trick is to get people to change their behaviours to focus on the ‘right’ issues – like having an effective website. This needs user-based evidence on how to address user goals, clear leadership to direct and inspire, and the participation of the organisational members in changing their behaviours.

Understanding the user experience can be a powerful tool in disturbing tacit assumptions and ‘mental models’ about how the world works. The user is often not well understood by staff within the organisation. It is only by listening to users talk about their goals, or watching users on the website and seeing their frustration (often over things which should be very easy to do) will people develop new mental models of users’ requirements, and be motivated to change things.

The Partnership has worked with many public and private sector organisations, undertaking user goal and usability research, where the aim is as much about getting ‘change’ within the organisation, as it is about getting research findings on specific issues. Often, the web team has a very clear idea of what the problems are (the research just goes to confirm the problems) – the big issue is actually getting other people (e.g. senior managers, marketing communications, sales) to agree to the appropriate changes, or change the way they do things, in order to make the website more effective. Just giving these people reports about research is not enough – they need to see and feel the experience. The greatest power for change comes when it really hurts!

What can the organisation do?

Change cannot be ‘done’ to an organisation – the organisation has to commit to the process and ‘do it to itself’ - prescriptive blueprints won’t work. However, there are certain key elements that need to be incorporated into a change framework aimed at focusing the organisation on developing and maintaining an effective website: • A clearly articulated strategy about what the website is trying to do • Rigorous user-based research to bring up users’ requirements: it’s all too easy for everyone to think they know what users want – but it’s only by getting evidence from users can the organisation be sure that they’re getting it right • The opportunity for staff to experience the users’ reactions, in order to challenge their assumptions and values, and develop their knowledge of the issues • Enabling staff to develop a shared understanding of the issues: even having watched users on the website, different people will take away a different interpretation and understanding of what they have seen. It is only by articulating and sharing these understandings that a common view of a problem can be gained. • Agree actions themselves: recommendations on how to fix problems are often developed by ‘experts’. However, they may not understand the organisational constraints and so the recommendations may not be implemented. Actions developed by the people responsible for implementing them are more likely to be implemented. • Developing staff knowledge and understanding of the principles of developing a usable website through a series of activities (e.g. reading, workshops, networking, usability testing etc.) • Develop ‘change agents’ - individuals who operate in their areas of influence in order to help embed a culture where a good user experience on the website (if not more broadly) is seen as a critical success factor.

And change does not happen overnight. But we have worked with a large range of clients where a mix of the above activities really does start to make a difference over time.

Sarah Burton-Taylor
Web Usability Partnership

© The Web Usability Partnership

Associated Link: Web Usability Partnership

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