End of Year Check Up for Your Website: Design

Does your website need a redesign? If it’s been a few years since it was built, it probably could use a design update, at least. See Your Website: Update, Refresh, or Redesign? for some questions that will guide your decision on whether you need a new design or just a new look. Sometimes replacing the header and the photos — a content fix — will be enough. If you really need a new design, though, content fixes won’t be enough.

Often a redesign is mostly a matter of hiring a great designer and letting them get their work done. Sometimes, though, you have specific concerns and points that have come up in your end of year checkup (or a site analysis at any point in the year) and you have specific things you want to improve.

We’re doing a redesign for a site right now for The Retreat at Skyridge, an Ozarks cabin resort. We built their site a few years ago with Sharp Hue, and there have been a number of changes in the meantime.  Now they’re ready for a redesign.

Over the years that they’ve had their website, Skyridge has learned a lot about how it works and how they want it to work. They had a lot of ideas about the design, a lot of materials and photos to contribute, and a lot of specific intentions from the point of view of search. This wealth of input has made the process more collaborative than a lot of redesigns, and that’s great.

But we (Haden Interactive) and the designer (Tom Hapgood) are not close enough to Skyridge to be able to meet directly around a table very often. We found that emails and phone conversations weren’t getting the ideas across well enough and we needed greater clarity.

The solution for us was Notable, a clever tool that makes it easier to talk about a design. You capture a design at Notable from a website (as in, the design at your current site that you want to change) or a file on your computer (as in, the mockup you want to discuss) and Notable will give you a nice clear screenshot. You can upload a variety of file types or use a wide range of browsers and devices — important, since the capture from your browser or mobile device may not be what your designer is looking at.

Now you can go to the specific place on the design that you want to discuss and add a number. No more conversations like, “Are you talking about the line at the top right? The very top right or the part where there’s a picture of, like, a pitcher or something?”

You can immediately write a note, and that note will be neatly lined up by the picture.

Others can comment on your note, so discussions about a particular element stay together. This is a great relief for those of us who’ve left notes in Basecamp like, “I don’t see Image #44756 on the homepage– do you mean the one with the wires on the side looking kind of like a tree? Or are you talking about a different file from the one Jo posted this morning?”

In fact, this is exactly what’s so great about Notable. You can be just as specific as if you were sitting around the screen together pointing at things — plus, you have a record of all the comments everyone has made. You can export the resulting discussion as a PDF and save it in a file cabinet if you feel like it, providing a paper trail, but Notable will save all the discussions for you in the cloud where everyone can return to it whenever they need to.

Some other great tools for the design checkup and redesign processes:

• Google Analytics in-page analytics tell you what visitors to your site click on and what they ignore. Most of our clients find this surprising — what we think our visitors do isn’t always what they do.

• Crazy Egg produces heat maps and other visual representations of visitor behavior that can help you decide whether your site needs major changes.
• 5 Second Test is a good alternative to grabbing people to test your site or your new design. Viewers see a design for 5 seconds and then answer questions about it. You can upload your design and let people give you feedback in several different ways. The problem, to my mind, is that so many of the people who volunteer to test stuff at 5 Second Test are themselves designers or web pros that the results may be less reliable than those with naive subjects. However, the short time frame increases the chances of reliability.
• Spyrestudios has a list of usability tools including those above (which we use) plus a bunch we haven’t tried. Let us know how you like them! Several of them give you good ways to measure and track the responses of your human testers, too.