How I use consumer behaviour to design websites

Objective Digital is a website testing company that takes a slightly different approach – it focuses on consumer behaviour rather than pure design. It’s worked for it so far, with clients including Telstra and Westpac, and revenue of about $2.5 million.

Founder James Breeze says too many companies don’t understand what makes solid web design work. He says focusing on behaviour, rather than the attractiveness of a site, will net positive results.

How’s business been this year?

We’ve had a great year, and we’re going to do very well. We’ve got quite a few staff on now, and one each booked for every month in the March quarter. We have about 10 employees now, although that depends on how many contractors we have at any one time.

It’s going very well, and we’re just trying to manage the growth and automate some processes to keep things running smoothly.

So what can you describe about how your testing process works?

So we mostly work in medium to large companies that have a web presence or internal software that is used for end users, most of the time those things will be used by quite a lot of people.

It might be a consumer website for a bank, a B2B website for another company, and so on. These are usually clients that are spending a large amount of money on technology and want to make sure they get it right the first time.

Usually what happens is the marketing director or senior people in the company ask us to come help them out.

When do businesses usually approach you?

People come to us during their development cycle at various points, but the ones that come at the end aren’t necessarily the best.

We do a lot of usability testing that fits into design, so when companies come to us saying they’ve already done a website and want to shoehorn in the usability, it can be frustrating.

The best is when we get companies coming in before they’ve even started a project, saying they want to do it properly and want to create a website that really understands customer behaviour.

And what’s the first step?

We need them to put together a profile of users, so people who are likely to use the site, such as age, salary, that sort of thing.

Then what do you do?

Usually then we review where the site is at, and take a lot of high level understanding of those users to start interacting with the software.

We need to understand what type of people are using the website because we need to know what they want to do online. Until we understand that we don’t know how to approach the project.

How do you do that? What sort of behaviour do you keep in mind when designing?

For example, people might be avid users of Facebook, iTunes or Flickr, and might be in that key demographic of users. And if you’re building, say, an entertainment portal, then the expectations those users have of what your website will be like is a lot different because they’ve been using those other websites.

You don’t want to make a direct copy or anything, but you just need to understand how expectations of your users are modified.

How important is understanding that whole process when designing?

Understanding the process is critical. Most research that’s done is all about how they feel, what they want, expectations, but it’s never about what they actually do. This is critical. In order to design good websites we need to understand people’s behaviour.

Could you explain how that can go wrong?

So, a lot of the time design gets done just for design’s sake. People draw and design things themselves, or an agency will design things for a business that aren’t based in a solid understanding of who the customer is and what they want.

You need to be able to empathise with the user and see what they want. Only then can you start designing an interface for them.

The biggest issue is that people don’t really think about that, and then you end up with all this mess on a website.

And so how do you incorporate that into your design?

Well, we don’t really colour in a website, so to speak. We build wire frames that articulate how the process should work, and build simple prototypes. But we don’t code it. That’s not our core skill – our core is understanding how and why people do things.

For those businesses building websites, what should they take away from your experience to help make a better site?

Show people and get their feedback on it immediately. Whether it’s your mother, child, colleague, get them to try the website and figure out whatever it is they’re trying to achieve.

Businesses tend to work on their websites in isolation, and they try to have project guidelines and get something done without testing it along the way. That’s a mistake.