Psychology of a Website

I recently hosted a roundtable discussion with members of the Business Marketing Association Colorado Chapter. We discussed how a website can no longer be "one size fits all", that good old marketing 101 tactics need to be employed before you ever start designing and building a website.

I showed an extreme example of a website with way too many things happening just on the Home page and asked the attendees these questions:

Do you feel like your company’s website is evolving into this?
Do you really have that many messages for that many people?
Are the stakeholders within your organization all fighting for real estate instead of prioritizing to serve your target audience?

Here is a link to that site:

I went on to show a site that has, in my opinion, provided a well thought out design geared specifically for its target audience (unfortunately since the writing of this blog, Intuit, who purchased the company a few months ago, has revamped the website into a plain vanilla envelope of a site):

• Y Generation
• Tech savvy, culturally liberal & environmentally conscious

We then discussed a faux case study of a company that wants to provide an online money management website for Mexican American small business owners in the Denver, Colorado market. The company would generate its profit by selling investment and other banking services through the website, while providing its site users a simple to use tool for managing both their business and personal finances.

Our first objective was to identify the Target Audience, research who they are and why they buy, and then translate that data into User Preferences to then create a Blueprint document that could be handed over to the website design and development team to build a website to serve this specific set of users.

We decided that basic demographics, which can be found on the US Census website, along with some key Cultural Differences, are what we needed to better understand our audience. There were several considerations that we discussed for this exercise:

• Cultural Group vs. Minority - cultural group is a more modern and descriptive term
• Mexican American vs. Hispanic - each group has its own identity, if lumped together the differences disappear
• Cultural Differences vs. Stereotypes - for instance individuals within this cultural group might refer to themselves as Latino, Hispanic or Mexican American
• Research vs. Assumption - don’t assume user preferences

We then talked about how to determine the Cultural Differences between the general population and our target audience. We determined that it is a matter of hiring a research company and/or surveying a segment of the target market and/or having a resource within your organization that already posses key knowledge of these differences.

My company has such a resource for this faux case study. Here are the Cultural Differences for our target audience that we needed to consider (for additional details on each of these bullet points, please contact me):

• A Collectivist Culture With Strong Family Values (Familismo)
• A Hierarchical Culture That Values Respecto  
• Hierarchy in Families
• Uncertainty Avoidance/Fatalismo
• Task vs. Relationship/Simpatia and Personalismo

At this point we had defined our target audience, researched some basic demographics to understand who they are and then determined their key Cultural Differences. Now it was time to translate this information into a set of User Preferences for the website.

There is no magic formula for this process; it is a collaborative effort with the key stakeholders of the website. What is important is to have taken this approach to first identify your Audience(s) so that you can think about how they want to interact with your company.

In the final step I showed the attendees a free online tool for building Site Maps (visual representations of the website structure, similar to an organizational chart) and Wireframes (simple two dimensional representation of an actual web page layout) called Cacoo. It is an extremely easy to use tool and has several collaborative tools so that you can work with a team of people located anywhere in the world.

By converting the User Preferences that your marketing team created through this process into a Site Map and Wireframes, you now have a Blueprint to hand off to your web designers and developers to build the best website experience possible for your site's Target Audience.

If you have questions, please contact Ken Sabey by phone (303.506.3406) or email (Ken@WebptOh.com).