How to protect your users from those pesky stakeholders
by Antonio on 13/05/09 at 12:30 pm
Part of what a producer (that’s me) does should be to design around what users really need, and to protect the design from becoming negatively influenced by political pressure from stakeholders (who unfortunately are often the ones paying for it).
I’ve seen some shocking cases of Stakeholderitis this year, but last week I saw an inspiring example of how to avoid it.
Nick Torday from Breast Cancer Care gave a wonderful talk at Aquent’s Third Sector Forum event about the 2 year redesign of their website.
What really impressed was me how the charity put user experience at the heart of the redesign process from start to finish. The first thing they did was to hire a user experience design and research company (Flow Interactive) to work with users to find out what they needed. This ended up being centred primarily around the cancer sufferers themselves, and specifically around each person’s position on the cancer “journey” (a fascinating concept which warrants a post in itself).
This was a huge change from the previous website, whose homepage was dominated by fundraising messages. The research suggested putting these messages to the background. There was restistance from the fundraising and marketing departments, but by having solid research and making these into firm business cases the user experience won through.
To help things along, they involved people from different departments in the design, including a nurse with no previous new media skills who came on to the design team full-time.
The result? Huge increase in traffic and quality of experience, no decrease in funds raised, Impressive stuff.
Bobbie Gardner
May 14th, 2009
Wow! The website is totally different – I recall from raising money for BC a few years back. It’s loads better!!
Def has more of a wordpress feel and more user friendly – putting cancer patients first.
Consultation is key – wish it happened more with community music projects – witnessing a lot of great project ideas but not matched with participants’ needs…
Jamie Huskisson
May 15th, 2009
Broken link on flow interactive. (feel free to edit this out after fixing it!)
Stakeholders are quite a bit of the problems we face in maintaining quality throughout a project. It is difficult to deal with them but I find starting out by ensuring the stakeholders know you are the authority on the web side of the project helps significantly.
Antonio
May 17th, 2009
Jamie – I agree that authority is essential in getting people aligned behind a shared vision. I find people are willing to have their minds changed if you can advocate passionately enough!
Bobbie – Yup! Don’t get me started!!
A
DN
Oct 5th, 2009
Wow! The website is totally different – I recall from raising money for BC a few years back. It’s loads better!!
Def has more of a wordpress feel and more user friendly – putting cancer patients first.
Consultation is key – wish it happened more with community music projects – witnessing a lot of great project ideas but not matched with participants’ needs…