Web Editor Resources
Multiple resources are available to website editors hat can transform your web presence, making our websites the premier location for information and task completion.
Existing Data
Existing data can be used to show what is important to our users. Analytics and site search data can reveal what content is most popular and often what users are looking for. This does not mean this is all that is important. It only provides insight into what already exists, not what needs to exist. Additional existing data sources include Google Analytics, support tickets, phone calls, emails, enhancement requests, and more. Google Analytics page views can be used to create a content plan for your homepage or help plan a rapid content audit.
Content Strategy
A content strategy can direct not only new content creation but existing content as well. Your content strategy outlines the who, what, when, where, why, and how of publishing content to your website and contemplates other channels as part of your multi-modal, omni-channel communications plan. It will contain a strategic statement tying content to business goals and define the people (or roles), processes, and power to execute that statement. Your content strategy will get the right content to the right person at the right time for the right action.
Identify Your Audience
For your content to be effective, you need to know who your audience is. Focus groups, interviews, and testing with website audience members are effective ways to identify requirements and pain points, build personas, and create accurate user journey maps. Business owning areas can contemplate using existing communities of practice or other existing stakeholder groups as test subjects. Business process owning areas should use the FAS communication planning tools to perform audience and stakeholder analysis as part of overall communication planning.
Stakeholder Engagement and Process Reviews
Website and communication planning and improvements should be incorporated into existing stakeholder engagement activities that support business process improvement and operational excellent projects and activities with communication planning and website planning as deliverables of stakeholder engagement efforts. Qualitative data should be collected to support quantitative search and behavior data and to evaluate the efficacy of existing processes that are supported by digital content (e.g., forms). Focus groups are an excellent tool for stakeholder engagement and gathering feedback from a similar group of users. Moderators provide a safe place to provide honest feedback. Consider leveraging communities of practice and other stakeholder engagement groups as focus groups.
User Journey Mapping
Using personas, identify the top tasks that you want your users to accomplish or the information you need for your communication to be effective and follow the path that they must take to get there. Do they need to leave your site to accomplish it? Is this a cross-organizational task and one we need to address with the other organization(s)? Can we use existing digital tools like Docusign, to streamline a process and eliminate a user being bounced between departments? This can be done on an individual page basis as part of the content audit.
Content Audits
Every piece of content on your website should have a purpose. Existing content needs to be audited so it remains relevant to the intended audience. A content audit will eliminate R.O.T.—Redundant, Outdated, or Trivial content. And while a content audit is a significant undertaking, the time saved by users completing tasks and finding information on their own, far outweighs the time spent performing the audit. If resources are limited, a rapid content audit can focus on your most-used content delivering the most impact for the time spent. A rapid content audit will focus on the pages that have the highest percentage of usage. Use Google Analytics to determine what pages account for 70, 80, or 90% of your views and concentrate your audit on those pages. For websites with a narrow focus, this may be 10 or fewer pages. For a more diverse website, you may have to audit many more pages to reach 90%.
Homepage Design
Your homepage, like every page of your website, should be user- and task-focused. It should not feature your mission statement or a list of units a user must contact to accomplish tasks. Displaying content by primary audiences, top tasks, or popularity ensures a large percentage of visitors immediately find what they are looking for. Your homepage, like your website, should be user-focused to help users accomplish their tasks and interact with your organization in ways that work best for them, with the organizational structure taking a back seat to helping your users accomplish their goals.
Card Sort Testing
As defined by usability.gov, "Card sorting is a method used to help design or evaluate the information architecture of a site. In a card sorting session, participants organize topics into categories that make sense to them and they may also help you label these groups." Card sort UX research allows us to see how users name and organize our content, free of our preconceptions and organizational structure, making the website navigation user-focused and intuitive for both first-time and experienced users.
Page Tree Testing
Page Tree testing is a usability technique for evaluating the findability of a topic or completion of a task using only a website's navigation. Tree testing can quickly identify confusing navigation or terminology and can be combined with user interviews to understand exactly what a user is thinking while navigating a website.
First Click Testing
As defined by Optimal Workshop, "First-click testing is a usability technique that can show you what people click on first in a user interface when they're trying to complete a particular task. It's a simple and effective technique that can be used to test live websites, wireframes, and even physical products."
User Testing
User testing is used to evaluate any aspect of a digital or physical product with actual hands-on users. Users are often given a series of tasks, prompts, or questions and asked to narrate their thoughts and experience as it occurs.
Plain Language
Plain language is writing for your audience using language they understand and are comfortable with. Knowing your audience is key to writing to their level of understanding. Writing for a general audience is significantly different than writing for a professional accountant or engineer. Language, just like other parts of your digital presence, can be tested with users.