Summary: Moving ‚from company centric design to user centric design‘ is the eight corporate website trend we identified. This post is part of a series of blog posts in which we look at trends for corporate websites.
This trend does certainly not only apply to corporate websites. In fact, this applies to any product or service in this world. To be successful any product or service needs to be useful, usable, delightful and accessible. You may want to add affordable, but in the end people are willing to pay a premium if the aforementioned product or service characteristics are fulfilled.
Useful – is one of the key characteristics to make a product or service successful. In the past, product and service providers often assumed that they would know what their users wanted. Even worse, in some cases providers never even had an interest in why and how users would use their products or services. Look at Enterprise IT. Most systems are completely unuseful and unusable! This is changing. New disciplines like User Experience Design have emerged. It goes way beyond traditional visual design and usability approaches, as it places the user with all his needs and behaviour at the very centre. The same is true for service design, which follows similar customer centric principles.
What does this all mean when you consider relaunching your corporate website? In previous blog posts of this series I mentioned a number of interesting examples from companies and how they have implemented the various corporate website trends. These example may make sense to those companies and their audience, but maybe not for you. Therefore, user research has become a critical component in developing new products and services. There are different methods of user research from surveys and interviews to focus groups or even observing representatives of your target audience.
One of the most common and scalable approaches are anonymous surveys like the one from HP below.
HP – Invitation to participate in a survey on the corporate website
Designing surveys is a science in itself. You will need to evaluate the number of questions, the conclusions that can be drawn from the answers, the time people are willing to spare to participate and many other factors. Many survey providers offer packages including for surveying visitors to corporate websites. This should help to get you on the right track and you can build from there.
An anonymous survey is something that scales nicely, is affordable and depending on the design of the survey and overall number of visitors can provide you with supporting data points. It will hardly be the case though that insights gained from the survey will drastically impact your strategy or functionality. It can either be used on an ongoing basis to capture feedback and learn about potential improvements or for the relaunch of the corporate website to gather additional data points to support initial assumptions.
Interviews are another research method that allow you to go deeper on needs and behaviours of your target audience. It may sound strange at first to want to interview journalists, analysts or CSR professionals. Besides, you may refrain from doing so, because everyone is extremely busy. That is true. But most people can spare 10-15 min, especially if you already have a connection with them (e.g. journalists that cover your company often). They feel valued that you ask them for their opinion. And in the end their time might be excellent invested, as the new corporate website should help them in their job. Thus, a win-win situation.
Best to label the interview as a conversation and ideally pick it up when you need to talk to the other person anyway. What is highly important though is that you do not ask ‚What functionality would you like?‘. It’s a hit and miss. Better to allow your conversation partner to explain how they work. If it is a journalist, how does he get ideas for stories? How do they decide which story is worthwhile writing? How do they research the story? Of course you can also ask what they like/dislike about your website or what other corporate website they like. Similar for other audiences like analysts and investors, CSR professionals, career seekers, consumers etc. What you really want to understand is their way of working and where you could imagine functionality to improve their way of working and interaction with you and your company (including through the corporate website). From that insight you can derive relevant functionality and design the experience the way it makes sense to the user.
This blog post is part of a series of posts in which we delve into the trends for corporate website that we have identified. The series:
- From static to real-time information
- From text to active content
- From channel to canvas
- From desktop to mobile
- From single source of truth to the provider of different opinions
- From destination to platform
- From providing information to providing a service
- From company centric design to user centric design
- From single launch to continuous improvement
© Picture Credit: Felix Cohen