UIEtips Article: Thinking in the Right Terms: 7 Components for a Successful Web Site Redesign
UIEtips 8/30/07: Thinking in the Right Terms: 7 Components for a Successful Web Site Redesign
A few weeks back, I had the chance to talk with Gerry McGovern, author of Killer Web Content and UI12 Speaker Extraordinaire. We talked about a variety of aspects of designing web sites, but one theme we kept coming back to was about how prepared the team was for the long haul.
During the talk, I realized people who have experience building brochures and marketing materials might come to the web design process with a misleading perspective. With a brochure, you carefully construct the design and messaging, put it into production, and then never see it again. Rarely do you get to see anyone interact with the brochure. That information never informs the design of future brochures.
Gerry made the great point that web design is very different. It’s an iterative process where you’re receiving constant information after the design. This information allows you to tweak and enhance the design, often in small ways, to make continual improvements. Most of the work happens after the initial production, not before, as in a brochure.
In this week’s UIEtips, I’ve described the findings from recent research on web site redesigns. In this article, I talk about seven strategies we see employed by the organizations best at redesigns.
Have you employed these strategies? Are you finding hurdles from thinking too much in the short term? We’d love to hear your thoughts on the challenges when redesigning web sites. Join the discussion below about this week’s topic.
Want to learn more? At this year’s User Interface 12 Conference, Gerry McGovern will present How to Design a Task-Based Information Architecture, to give you a solid grounding in IA that will enable you to create designs that help your users find what they want.