I read a report today from Marketing Sherpa that discussed Dolby®’s recent site revamp. There are three guidelines that I extracted from the report as I thought they were worth pointing out:
- Create detailed personas
For those of you who may be new to this concept, personas are detailed descriptions of users to your site. While some sites choose to create many personas, I like to keep it simple by only creating 2-5. Creating a persona will help you define and segment your web audience in a way that will help you make educated assumptions about what they look for, how they navigate and more. - Designate areas for promotion and branding
A clean, organized site will help keep your customers oriented. I’ve been a strong proponent of wireframing for quite a while now. Often, designers will start with full-color screens and mockups to illustrate a site design. This methodology can yield a visually appealing web site but can neglect site architecture and organization. I always start with a wireframe, where I will organize content into regions on the screen. Only when I’m happy with the wireframe will I open Photoshop and apply a visual treatment. - Usability study to prove the hypothesis
During a usability test, you can gather feedback from real users. This can help you determine if the assumptions you made while creating personas was correct, as well as find interface glitches and points of confusion for users of your web site.
