Keeping users in mind: a reading list
Small budgets and tricky internal structures don't have to stop you from thinking about the people that use your website. Torchbox explains how we can keep users in mind with this helpful reading list.
Many of our clients recognise the importance and value offered by a long term relationship with Torchbox.
We favour strategy and iteration over the ‘drop in, take the money and dash’ approach because we know long term, intelligent, user-centred thinking is better for our clients and offers a better user experience.
Keeping users in mind isn't just a job for digital agencies. It's a perspective that can offer enormous benefits for entire organisations. This is why our discovery work focuses on not just research but education as well. This list of resources will help you understand why you need to stop stuffing your user research into a drawer and make it part of your daily workflow with just a small amount of time and effort.
Service Design: From Insight to Implementation
Many of our clients in the charity sector deliver some sort of service, be it support, education or information. Understanding how your website fits into a broad ecosystem of brand-to-audience touchpoints is critical to delivering a consistently positive service and increasing service user engagement. ‘Service Design: From Insight to Implementation’ uses the author’s experience, backed up with case studies to provide practical advice in implementing a user-centred service.
Government Digital Services Blog
Government Digital Services (or GDS) are revolutionising how the British government present online services to the public for everything from voter registration to tax returns. Starting with user needs as their number one guiding design principle, the impact is a visible transformation of the way government does digital for the better. GDS use their blog to share insights about their processes. Now if only someone would apply the same thinking to the rest of government!
A List Apart - A Checklist for Content Work
For many years websites were used as ‘a place for stuff’. They became the dumping ground for any piece of content an organisation had ever developed. When someone comes to your website they can't find what they are looking for amongst the noise. Making sure you have a good understanding of why the content on your site is there and who it serves with help you reduce the user's frustration. A starting point might be to implement a content checklist within your editorial process.
Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-it-yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems
This book is a classic that will no doubt be familiar to anyone who has been working in the industry for even a short amount of time. It's aimed at helping you understand how you can improve the usability of your website yourself with a simple commitment of just a morning a month.
Google Analytics, Trends and AdWords
Ok, so it’s not the most digestible item on this reading list but it is a very important one. Learning to use and understand even the basics can help you understand your users and build a case for areas of improvement on your site. Google Analytics might just provide the evidence you need to persuade senior management to look more closely at how they are putting together their budgets.
Here are the good people of GDS explaining how you can use these tools intelligently.
That’s it for now. I’m always available for a chat about how Torchbox can help you with your user experience goals, just send me an email at [email protected].