Tag Archives: IA

Would I call myself a user experience expert? Probably not. Do I feel I have some great experience and insight into the matter that may help online marketers? Absolutely!

At Suitcase, we work with a diversity of brands. Retail brands, financial brands, telecom brands, travel and tourism brands…. And the list goes on. The experience of each brand needs to be vastly different and must deliver an experience appropriate to that brand. With that in mind, marketers must strive to establish clear and specific goals that can be used to measure the effectiveness or “success” of any digital communication or website. These benchmarks, often called “success events”, must look  beyond site traffic and unique visits to clearly identify a path or set of activities for users to accomplish that, in doing so, will have indicated a successful experience.

As experience professionals, when architecting an effective user experience, we must coach our clients to consider the many potential “success events” within the experience.  My first introduction to success events as a concept came from our partners at Omniture . They really hit home with their point that a website must have loftier goals for its performance beyond site traffic and visitors. Bringing users to the site should be only the first part of the process.  Of course in theory I agreed with this simple and straightforward point. But the way he was talking about it made something click for me. It opened my eyes and got me excited. What it meant was that, if we really focus on these success events, we can better measure the conversations users are having with our clients’ brands.

Here’s the thing: If we are clever enough to entice a visitor out of the vast crowds surfing the massive webosphere (which in itself is a huge challenge and a topic for an upcoming post) we must then guide that visitor to perform whatever specific task the brand wants them to complete. We must engage them in a conversation. So to start that conversation we could ask them to watch a company video, play with a cool widget, or the easy engagement to measure.. ask them to buy something.

As user experience professionals, we must realize that we’re not just designing a website or the pretty graphics that comprise a rich user interface. No. We’re architecting and designing a system of communication that persuades real people with real information needs to travel down a very specific path towards a measurable outcome. And at discrete points along that path, we’re dropping in specific activities for them to accomplish that can be used to measure where they are at in the conversation, and entice them to continue.

Whatever the case, lets measure the conversation they are having with your brand. When you know what your client is going to measure within the experience, then you can build your IA/UX (information Architecture and User Experience) around those “success events”. If its done any other way I feel the project will lack insight and the end result could be dry and boring and also there will be no clear measurement on how effective your end to end experience performed.

Category: User Experience