Redesign: The Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

REDESIGN: THE PITFALLS AND PERILS AND HOW TO AVOID THEM Jeff Wisniewski [email_address] Computers in Libraries 2009

BAD REASONS TO REDESIGN
It’s been X months/years since we redesigned
The boss says I have to
I’m boooooored with the site

GOOD REASONS TO REDESIGN
When your navigation is dysfunctional
When your site doesn’t scale
When your site is difficult to update
When your code is hopelessly, cough cough, sick
When your site has low usability
When it is not performing based on your sites’ goals/objectives (you do have those, right?)

REDEVELOP VS REDESIGN
Redevelop= triple bypass
Redesign= cosmetic surgery

COST COMPARISON Cost to you Cost to user Redesign Low Low Redevelop High High

AMAZON: 2000

AMAZON: 2009

THIS IDEA ISN’T EXACTLY NEW…
The Quiet Death of the Major Re-Launch
By Jared M. Spool
Originally published: May 20, 2003

USERS DISLIKE REDESIGNS…ALOT
Facebook anti-redesign group has 1.7 million members.
last.fm: redesign drew over 2,000 comments often strongly negative.
The Guardian, FT.com, and the BBC also transformed themselves recently, with ‘robust’ opinion voiced on each.

CAVEATS
Beware the vocal majority?
Be evidence based…your new sites tests better, right?

REDESIGN AND THE FIVE STAGES OF USER GRIEF
Denial : “Why did you change it? I was always able to find what I needed!”
Anger : “You have rendered the site useless and I will never use it again!”
Bargaining : “If you could just revert back to the OLD ejournal page that would be great!”
Depression : “I have no idea what I’m going to do now…”
Acceptance : “While I dislike the design I was able to find the catalog link quite easily…”

DO WE REALLY HATE TO REDESIGN?
Maintenance = Boring
Redesign = Exciting

Happiness Time You Users Launch

Time until “redesign” (months) 12 0 6 amount of maintenance performed a lot pretty much none

PITFALL: THINKING INSIDE THE BOX
Is a traditional “page-based model” best?
CMS
Blog
Wiki

DISCOVERY

PITFALL: NOT KNOWING ENOUGH ABOUT YOUR CURRENT SITE BEFORE YOU BEGIN
Look at where people are going in the site, where they're NOT going, what pages they enter into and what pages they leave from
Google analytics
Clicky
Review past usability studies
If it’s been a while do one NOW
TIP: find and document your current page rank

PITFALL: PROCEEDING WITHOUT CONSENSUS ON GOALS AKA BUY-IN
Investing time reaching consensus on:
The need for a change
What needs to be changed
What the desired outcomes are
Data is awfully helpful here

TWO TIPS ON GENERATING BUY-IN
Show your director/manager what cool things other libraries are doing
Show him or her data indicating that your site is not functioning well

PITFALL: TRYING TO REACH TOO MUCH CONSENSUS
Design by committee=death
Data + evidence-based practice=harmony and world peace

PITFALL: BEING AN EXPERT
Define constituencies and INCLUDE them in the process
Librarians ARE users of the site but they’re also information EXPERTS with mad skills

PLANNING

“ Spend your money where the water is”
Know where your water is!

PITFALL
Spending too much time “designing”
“ I'm going to go out on a limb and beg you not to create an original design. There are more than a billion pages on the web. Surely there's one that you can start with? “
-Seth Godin

LOOK HERE
http://www.freecsstemplates.org/
http://www.csszengarden.com/
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/style/layouts/
http://webdesign.about.com/od/websitetemplates/a/bl_layouts.htm

PITFALL
Failing to account for assessment time & effort

PITFALL
Looking at only other library sites

PITFALL: NOT HAVING SMART GOALS FOR THE REDESIGN
S pecific
M easurable
A ttainable
R ealistic
T imely

EXAMPLE GOALS
Increase Google page rank and search result exposure
Improve overall site usability
Measurable increase in use of ejournal finder
Measurable decrease in content update lag times
Show increase in user engagement as measured by number of blog comments

PITFALL: FAILING TO COMMUNICATE ENOUGH
Consider a redesign blog or wiki
Manage expectations

EXECUTION

PITFALL: COMMUNICATING TOO MUCH
Redesign by committee is rarely pretty (hey that rhymes!)
Look to evidence to short circuit tedious discussions
http://usability.gov
http://useit.com
http://www.surl.org/
http://www.uie.com/

PITFALL: Not providing users a clear path
Define the primary functions of your site and make sure these paths are clear

PITFALL
Reinventing the wheel
from JavaScripts to CSS…chances are it’s been done already

PERFECTION PARALYSIS
Get it out of the door already!

WHERE TO SPEND TIME, MONEY AND EFFORT
Remarkable content
Engagement tools
Testing

REMARKABLE CONTENT
You have a staff full of experts!
Reading lists
Course based guides
Reviews
White papers: copyright, foreclosure resources, how to get content onto your iPod

REMARKABLE TOOLS
Next gen opac
Federated search
Ejournal finder
Photo tagger
Assignment calculator

REMARKABLE CONTENT…
… is WELL WRITTEN content
Cut and paste
Invest time in rewriting content

PITFALL
Not designing with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in mind
URL structure
Simple URLs
Page titles
Descriptive
Proper and consistent user of structural HTML
<h1> <h2> <h3> etc
Descriptive <alt> tags

MORE SEO
Submit a sitemap to Google after your redesign
http://code.google.com/p/sitemap-generators/wiki/SitemapGenerators
Ask Google to remove outdate/removed/old content from its index:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard
Site>Tools>Remove URLs

PITFALL
Not designing with Social Media Optimization (SMO) in mind
Social bookmark links: addthis.com
Tag your pages
Redesign with user generated content in mind

PITFALL
Moving and/or eliminating good content
… the whole baby and bathwater thing
Do page and keyword analyses…Google Analytics, etc.
Do server side redirects

DON’T FORGET TO…
Update your robots.txt file
Update your analytics definitions, paths, groups, etc.

MAINTENANCE

PITFALL
Not planning beyond the redesign
Content strategy
Mmmmmmm….that’s FRESH!
Maintenance strategy
Move from macro redesign to micro changes

Redesign: The Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

by Jeff Wisniewski

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