WordPress Tips

In our last post, we introduced the concept of creating an information architecture plan to ensure high quality, relevant content that results in better SEO. We ended that post on gathering data on your users. We follow now with creating customer personas, writing user stories, and a review of metadata, scenarios, and pages.

Create Dynamic Customer Personas and User Stories

Your website should target your desired customer, not everyone who might visit your site. This is where customer personas play a key role.

Personas are based upon facts typically derived from user research, and they are fictional representations of your target customer. They focus on motivations, goals, characteristics, and behaviors of the typical customer for your product or service.

Connecting Personas to Use Cases

Your next step is to connect the personas with use cases. Use cases offer a simple method to decide and describe the purpose of y our project. Use cases have 2 elements: actors and objectives.

The actors are the people using your website. You want to focus on the most critical groups – the user personas. Objectives are what one, some, or all of the personas seek to achieve. Each use case must have a specific objective, and the actors will perform tasks to achieve that objective.

Objectives may be things such as check an account balance, read a blog article, download software, book an appointment, take a survey, and so on. Use cases define the objectives and purpose: the problems to solve. Take time on this step as it is an element to improving customer lifetime value.

When you approach the website architecture by thinking about customer personas and what they want to achieve, you will develop the content with greater confidence and clarity.

Metadata, Scenarios, and Pages

Once you understand your users – their intentions, their motivations, and how they want to reach their objective – you can work to organize your content in a way that makes sense to those customers.

This is one great method for doing just that:

Figure out the metadata

Metadata represents information about information. It is what helps customers find the content they are seeking. For instance, let’s say you want to buy an inflatable T-Rex skeleton costume, and goes to a website that sells them. If you browse around and cannot find them quickly, it’s a sure sign of poor metadata. Getting the metadata correct is the first hurdle to clear.

You need to determine what kind of information to store about the products you sell. If you are selling that inflatable T-Rex skeleton costume, how will users search for it? By size? By brand? By price? Whether the costume includes the air blower? Are the batteries included?

Knowing the many different parameters and variables is the best place to start for excellent search results.

Create User Scenarios

To design the best experience for your customers, begin by thinking about scenarios featuring the user personas. A scenario is a story about someone, your customer, using your website to perform a specific task or objective. This could be buying a wedding dress, booking a vacation, or registering for a conference. Scenarios work in tandem with personas by serving as the reasons why that particular customer would come to your website.

What does that customer hope to accomplish on your website? What can help the user complete the task? What might cause friction?

You should focus on your users and the tasks in addition to your site’s organization and internal structure. As a result, you should gain insights into what content you need and how to structure it.

Got content? Need content? Need advice on designing your information architecture? Contact us at NOYO Web Development for a free consultation.