Preparing for a site re-design: don’t forget analysis

I’ve had to hone my persuasion skills lately, in trying to convince clients that performing quantitative site analysis before a re-design is a must-do activity.

Much to my dismay, I’ve discovered that once a client gets it into their head that they want to re-design their website, it’s ‘out with the old, in with the new’. Their customers have told them that the existing site doesn’t work, so they think there’s no point in analysing it. Instead, they want to toss the old site in the cyber-dustbin, and start coding again from scratch.

Sure, a clean start is nice. But what if you could use valuable insights about the strengths and weaknesses of your old site to improve the user experience design on the new site?

By identifying what works – and what doesn’t – before you embark on the re-design project, you reduce the likelihood of building a new site that may look better, but carries the same problems as before.

Through quantitative analysis, you can capture insights about your current users – customers and prospects – and understand how the site is currently being used. For example:

• You may find that a really important piece of content or functionality isn’t being used because it’s buried too far into the site. With the new customer experience architecture, you can devise pathways to guide traffic to these areas.
• By analysing the terms customers use on both internal and external search engines, you will learn the language your customers speak when referring to your products or services. This will help you devise the right labels, and contribute to your content strategy.
• You’ll see which areas of the site have been successful at converting customers, and which haven’t. For example, if you discover that most prospects use your calculator before lodging an online application for personal loans, then you may consider closely integrating the calculator in the customer experience architecture.
• You’ll discover the relative popularity of related items such as content categories and lists (often expressed as navigational menus). This should aid classification decisions. You may want to combine items that are receiving little attention or split items that are dominating. To take advantage of sequence bias in reading lists, you can enlist items in the order of popularity.
• You’ll identify where the exit points are and delve into factors that might influence the exits. If a page – especially a gateway or category page designed to steer traffic to detailed pages –experiences a high exit rate, it means either the page is getting untargeted traffic or there is something wrong with its design. Your experience architects should use these findings to contain the exit rate.

If you don’t perform quantitative analysis at this phase, then the user experience design phase becomes a subjective process – requiring large amounts of guesswork by your information architect. It’s guesswork that doesn’t need to happen, because the answers are right there on your current site.

Four years ago, I wrote about Understanding your website’s users. Never is this more applicable than in a re-design project.

We did in-depth quantitative analysis before commencing the site re-design for AMP, and the results speak for themselves.

And as for some other clients, I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt: they simply do not understand the full benefits of web analytics, and it’s my job to educate them about how valuable analysis can be at any stage of a website’s evolution.

What I want to know is, how many web analysts are putting their skills to use in a re-design project? When was the last time you used quantitative analysis to inform a website refresh? And if you did, what were the major discoveries you made that impacted the redesign?