In 2000 I worked for a Swiss web company for a very short time, a couple of weeks only. It was a contract job, in between some advertising jobs I was working on. The web company had just found out that their Flash site wasn’t doing anything. Still, their customers wanted Flash sites, but it dawned to this company, that Flash wasn’t ideal to deliver real content. It was pretty, but that was it.
So they found their new credo. Right out of the Cluetrain Manifesto: Content is king.
Of course that wasn’t new, but it didn’t matter. The whole point for a lot of companies like this one was, they didn’t get it, and now they did.
If you’re selling yourself as a web company, you try to impress your clients with professionalism, experience and knowledge. You don’t shout out you didn’t get something. So that’s what most companies I watched started doing. They wrote “content is king!” on their banners, pretending it was what they had always known.
A List Apart covered this topic with a very good article. It’s funny to read, and it nails the whole point of why it is important what you write in your about page. It’s even more than that, if you read it right. The essence of the article is true for all web writing, and for the Information Architecture structure of your website.
An excerpt from the article:
The real problem is a lack of attention to the user’s needs and the way that the organization’s communication goals can be met while serving those needs. The first and most important way to improve your About page is to think very carefully about what your visitors need and want from your About page. Personas are a useful tool for this sort of thing, but even a quick brainstorming session should produce results better than the ones we’ve seen above…It’s important to fulfill what you promise. If you write “learn more about us” and you don’t deliver, you add to the bad web experience of your visitors. And this isn’t something that becomes obvious in direct user testing groups. Looking at content with this kind of angle is something that comes out of natural web behavior. A user testing group is an artificial situation and it isn’t likely you will find out what’s wrong with your web content through usability tests. Your focus may be more like “do you get the navigation” and similar points.
…Once you know what your visitors want, make it easy to find. Want to keep your “press room” in its own section? Fine, but link to it from your About page anyway. Don’t hide things or force users to respect your internal organizational divisions. Give them what they need.
I have been pondering how to set up a good user-testing environment. Gaining feedback over some time, not in an artificially set up group. A good way to collect experiences that go deep to this level, beyond clicks per page and basic usability. I haven’t found a good solution yet, but I’m working on it. Any ideas?
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