Curse of websites and magical UX design

Imagine an ordinary director who decided to make an ordinary website for his no less than an ordinary company. He found the closest web developers with honest eyes and in a few words on one napkin he described the standard wishes of a regular corporate website. Or maybe he did it easier - he pointed to a similar site and said: “I need the same thing, only better!”. The developers, as usual, wrote the technical task for themselves and fulfilled it with honor. Then they were able to fill the site with content and launched, praying. For a month of work, a dozen robots and a few random visitors entered the site. The director was told about SEO, for which, reluctantly, he had to allocate 50 thousand rubles for three months. - “to try” and “for sure”. Due to the promotion, the site began to appear in search results and the counter began to show almost a thousand visitors a day. During this time, the managers were called by 5-10 people per month who said that they were watching the site and they had questions about the products. The real client was only one, and even then, in detail.

The director, killed by sadness, canceled all this senseless SEO and indignantly refused to offer more money for services of “partisan” and “social” marketing with a “100% result”. Attempts to find out the reason for the failure did not lead to anything - all the experts only shrugged and again advised to spend money on SEO, contextual advertising and marketing. Or order a new site from new developers - suddenly this time it will turn out better. And now the search for the causes of failure has moved from the region of the mind to the region of metaphysics. After all, it is not known - maybe the site developers have negative karma (on Habré), or the site hosting is located in the old Indian cemetery, or the server is not sprinkled with holy water, or jinxed by ftp, or is it the competitors paid money to the energy-informational psychic and he model tambourine) took, and the whole site was cursed!

The same inexplicable cases occur not only with corporate sites, but with all the others, especially with online stores and web services. It would seem that some good people ordered the site from other good people, they conscientiously made them a good site, and the result was not good. Who is guilty? What to do?
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Let's deal without mysticism. Suppose we checked the professionalism of web developers and checked the quality of their work from independent experts. Found that in this place there are no punctures. What else could be? Bad company, bad product? Check - ordinary company, ordinary goods. There is worse, there is better. Some of those who are “worse” live quite well and do trade through the Internet.

Guess what the problem is?

Let's reel back, at the time of the first conversation of the director and web developers. See, the director tells the web developers what he would like to see on the site, and they diligently write it down ... Stop! Here is the place. The director says that in his opinion should be on the site. Question: “How does he know?”

The fact that he knows what is needed from the site for his business - there is no doubt. But to decide how it should be implemented on the site, the director is completely incompetent. And how could he be competent? He has no experience in web technologies. He doesn’t know absolutely nothing about designing websites, but at this moment he’s actually engaged in designing his website, and at a professional level below the amateurish one. Therefore, it is not surprising that the result turns out to be “none” at best, and ridiculous and absurd at worst. For the head there is nothing wrong with entrusting this business to professionals. He also trusts bookkeeping to accountants, writing contracts to lawyers, and repairing toilet bowls to plumbers.

“Allow me, dear” - you say. “But this is clearly the area of ​​competence of web developers, who should, not we insist, who are simply obliged to engage in comprehensive design for the customer. They also pay money for it, in real business! ”It would have been like that if it had been that way. The design process with the participation of the customer is very controversial, and his main problem, as a rule, is the customer himself and his beliefs. To argue with the customer and independently put in the project solutions that complicate its development - only super reputable web developers (for example, “Artemy Lebedev Studio”) can afford to do it, well, or just idiots, who thereby only harm themselves. A normal web studio that earns money is primarily interested in making the site as easy as possible to design and have as little conflict with the customer as possible. That is why, the design is carried out by special people in the customer’s staff, and if there are none, independent outside consultants are invited.

The design itself is called User Experience Design (UX design) or in Russian “Designing user interactions”. As the name implies, it focuses specifically on the user and is a collection of various techniques made from a mixture of engineering disciplines, design, marketing, sociology and psychology. It sounds difficult, but in fact everything is easier. On the one hand, the goals and objectives of the system are defined, on the other hand, the goals and needs of users. And the task is to design the system so that they make friends with each other.

The work takes place approximately in the following sequence:

1. The goals and objectives of the system (products and customers in the case of marketing) are determined.
2. Users, their roles (based on their goals) and their behavior scenarios are defined.
3. Based on this, scenarios of user interaction with the system are built.
4. To implement interaction scenarios, it is required to describe the necessary functionality that this interaction will perform.
5. All this is modeled and collected in the form of interaction diagrams.
6. And it goes smoothly to the direct design of structural page patterns (wireframes).
7. On their basis, the final touch is already being done - usability and design.

If you look at all this from the customer’s side, then everything looks as follows:

1. UX comes to a designer or consultant to meet with the customer / author of the project and tries to fully understand the goals and objectives of the project (product-service and its features). And also create images of users (or customers-buyers).
2. During the discussion, the UX designer offers his own solutions for organizing user interaction based on his own experience and discusses them with the customer / author of the project.
3. Having learned all the necessary information, the UX designer proceeds to design (step by step from the previous list) and periodically synchronizes his work with the vision of the customer / author of the project.
4. The result of the work is a finished project in the form of an exhaustive description of all aspects of interaction, functionality, and with a preliminary block design that is suitable for any web developers as a technical task. And perhaps the best and most accurate technical tasks, from those that they usually get.

UX design is not a panacea for all ills. But if you need to make the website (online store, web service) comfortable for people, then you only need it. They can increase the conversion of visitors into customers / buyers / users. There is a good phrase: “UX design is a scientific rationale for common sense.”

It is necessary to say a little about the differences between UX design and usability, and then many have the feeling that this is the same thing. Usability is within the scope of UX design techniques and is responsible for the convenience, consistency, consistency and consistency of the visual interface. In other words, usability answers only the question “How to do?”, And the UX design first of all begins with the question “What to do?”.

Example: You gave the usability task to make the registration form for a new user as simple and clear as possible. He honestly took up this puzzle and issued a well-developed solution, although it still had all the fields needed for registration, questions and controls. If you had set the task to improve the site before the UX designer, he would most likely have thought of how to refuse to register at all and thereby remove extra steps for users. If it were a master of UX design, he could (in some cases) come up with how to abandon the entire site in general, and successfully accomplish his goals and tasks by repeatedly increasing the conversion (for example, integration into a social platform).

If you have a feeling that your site has covered a similar print of a curse, or you want to increase the conversion of visitors, or plan to make a new beautiful version of your site - you know what will help you and who you should contact.

PS I am promoting. eight-)