"It's always a good idea to talk to those who'll be using the final site, be that internal stakeholders, external customers or just members of the public," says Budd. "As such, we like to set up interviews, sit in on focus groups, and where possible run ethnographic studies. This usually feeds into the creation of user personas that help guide the decision-making process."
It's important not to make too many assumptions prior to involving users. Siim Vips, CEO at Modera warns: "In many cases, analysis is done based on the know-how of the development company in co-operation with the client. If the knowledge is there, the site will be a success, but if not, it will be a disaster." What you instead need to do is fully research the needs of the site's potential users and then map those onto the needs of your clients.
"If your users have needs that your client's site isn't fulfilling, you're giving the competition a competitive advantage," says Budd. "Similarly, if you're trying to make your users do something they don't want or need to do, they'll lose confidence in your brand and patience in your site." And with a high proportion of sites now hinging more than ever on user actions and content, users' needs and effects on proceedings must increasingly be taken into account.
"Designing social media projects brings new challenges to designers and information architects used to predefining the user environment," explains Crab. "You must plan to deal with the aesthetic and functional management of unpredictable content and behaviour."
Site maps
With an understanding of what the site's meant for, who's going to use it, and what people will be doing when they get there, you can start looking at the information that's going to be provided, how it's to be accessed and the basics of how it will be displayed.
"To work out information architecture, a combination of site maps, process flows and user paths is used," says Budd. Nhan argues that the first of those things is perhaps the most important tool for establishing how your information architecture will work – even for large sites. Some designers, he says, skip site maps these days, thinking complex sites are too difficult to represent in this manner.
"What you should do in such situations is break your site map down into sections for review," he says. "But never skip creating site maps, because they help you simplify the user experience by keeping perspective wide."
Marc Peter, creative director at on-IDLE, starts site maps with paper sketches, before moving them to software for emailing to various stakeholders. "We also ensure all elements present on all pages, such as footers, logos, calls to action, and so on, are listed," he explains.
"This then provides you with a base idea of the types of template the site will need, such as 'home', 'general content', 'contact', and 'listed items', and these can subsequently be worked into wireframes that identify the structure of each template – and therefore, effectively, each page of the website."
Peter notes that if particular attention is paid at this stage of the planning process, it's usually simple to avoid one of the most common errors on websites: bad navigation structures. "Often, you'll find sites have visible and working top-level buttons, but at the third, fourth or fifth level, the design begins to fall apart and the browsing experience becomes cumbersome."
Budd advocates workshops for making sense of this aspect of planning: "Stakeholder workshops are a good way of discovering business goals, prioritising functionality and setting a roadmap for success. As such, all of our projects are punctuated with various planning meetings and workshops that often involve brainstorming ideas based on the user research and personas, creating affinity maps or content hierarchies, and mapping out the interactions using rough paper prototypes or wireframes. As you can imagine, a lot of sticky notes are used during this process!"
