User Centered Web Design: Leveraging the Power of MODX to Avoid a Common Design Pitfall.
This is a big topic, and I feel woefully under-qualified to be leading a discussion on it. But I recently had a conversation with a client that brought this principle to center stage, in such a way that inspired me to share it with you. Feel free to "tell me how it really is" in the comments if you disagree :P Usually I put web-related stuff into this section of the blog, but I thought this topic was really a marketing issue.
The Problem
My client, we'll call them "XYZ", is planning a redesign - a complete repurposing, actually - of their site. It's going to be a news site of sorts, with a vast library of well-researched medical and health information. Because they have so much content, the conversation drifted immediately towards how to organize it all. Their designer had worked with The CMS That Shalt Not Be Named (TCTSNBN) before but never with MODX, so I was happy and eager to suggest MODX Revolution 2.2 and the new Articles blogging engine. This sort of comparison/competition between MODX and TCTSNBN, although tongue-in-cheek and more a fun thing than diehard competition, led me in this case to a common pitfall in web design: considering the technology before the user.
Guilty As Charged
It was my fault completely. I led the way on this one. I started going on about Categories versus Tags, and how they differ in the way they organized content. I rambled about the "permanence" of Categories and the "spontaneous, free-flowing" nature of Tags - all this because, even though the designer was familiar with TCTSNBN, the client had no experience with CMSs at all.
In short, I was thinking about the client - how should they organize their content? Should they have a blog or a website? How could I make things easy for someone who is new to web publishing? What are the best tools for my client to publish effectively? Don't get me wrong, some of these are good questions, but none of them addressed the real heart of the matter.
What Does Matter?
Thinking about my client's needs is something I do often and regularly, and probably you do too. The problem arises when we are designing websites for them - we have to remember that their website is not for them! A site that my client loves isn't worth the disk space it takes up if their clients don't love it - or at the very least, like it enough to give my clients business. Let me simplify that: we build websites not for our clients, but for our clients' clients. This fact is so obvious, and meant to be one of the first things we learn about web design and marketing, but I think it is the most-oft forgotten.
A Real-Life Example
So in the case of our news site, halfway through the conversation I had to stop myself and ask them: "Who is going to this site and what problem are they trying to solve when they arrive?" At that point, the correct workflow for designing the content structure became obvious:
- Create profiles representing a half dozen or so different market segments that may be visiting the site - our "Users".
- List the reason(s) for each of these Users to have visited the site - what specific problem are they trying to solve and what information are they looking for?
- Envision the steps that the user will have to take from any point of entry to get to the information they need.
- Reduce the number of those steps in any given scenario until every User can find what they want as quicky & easily as possible.
This is of course much easier said than done. The hard work is ahead of us, but what I wanted to illustrate here is how easy it is to forget the most basic and important of all components in a web design - the person using the site.
How MODX Saves the Day Again
At the end of the conversation, after we'd settled on this workflow, the question of technology came up again. "What are the technical limitations of organizing and displaying content on a website?" And this is where MODX really shines. Because really - there are no limitations. MODX is capable of, nay, built-from-the-ground-up to display and organize content in an endlessly flexible way. "Your Content, Your Way" is one of the CMS's taglines, and it has always been my favorite one. I love being able to say to my client with confidence, "You tell me what you want, and we'll make it happen." THAT is the Power of MODX - to make itself secondary to the human component.
Summary
It's never been truer, despite the times, that technology is secondary to the user. After all, we are all humans, and it's (usually) a human on the other end of the Internet who makes decisions that affect your bottom line. What we want from our technology is to get out of the way - to be transparent and simply help us in our efforts to serve our customers. On the web, that invisible friend is MODX.
If you aren't developing user centered websites with MODX, I highly suggest you try it. You won't regret it, and neither will your clients' clients ;)
