Approaching Digital Experiences Through Storytelling
Tags: UX Research, Content Strategy
Background
The most common digital experiences I am asked to reframe, revise, and redesign are websites. Although such redesigns center user experience and accessibility work, how can establishing an audience, an identity, or a story improve this process? This case study explores my overall research and design processes, which I employ. My goal is always to improve usability and accessibility, and I get there by centering the stories clients want to convey. This process was born out of website redesigns, but I also use it for new website builds.
Role
I have worked as a web consultant since 2019, revising, redesigning, and rebranding web experiences for clients across myriad professional spaces. In these spaces, I engage user experience research and design methods to craft experiences that support users’ needs.
Problem Statement
Website redesigns framed as retrofits ask: How do designers revise a website and make it fresh and exciting in its existing space? However, websites are digital experiences accessed through computers, tablets, and phones. Their content is created for specific audiences. Creating a new experience with awareness of both clients’ goals and users’ needs is essential to the website’s success. Therefore, it is impossible to effectively redesign a website without consideration of access and accessibility and the relationship between clients’ goals and users’ needs. In this context, I take access to mean the presence of information and whether its location can be accessed and accessibility to mean information’s ability to be accessed by everyone who interacts with it.
Process
The process begins by speaking with the client and asking smart questions. Two questions I find useful are: 1) What is the purpose of the website redesign? 2) Are there specific audiences you want to reach? In my experience, clients often answer the first question by saying they want to update the website aesthetic to match the rest of their organization’s website design. In response to the second question, they either have select audiences to address or they are unclear about the audiences they address.
With the context of these questions, the process takes its shape. If the client does not have defined audience groups, I direct the project toward user research. Clients usually provide broad, all-encompassing audiences like an entire community, whereas “defined audience groups” are categories of people based on specific use-cases related to the project. For a parking website, a defined audience group could be “visitors looking for parking passes” rather than “the university community.” Landscape analyses, content inventories, and stakeholder analyses are foundational for connecting the client’s web presence to audiences. A landscape analysis will highlight how similar websites approach the audience and what audiences they approach. A content inventory will highlight the audiences currently invited to the web experience. A stakeholder analysis will highlight all of the groups involved in the project and how they might want to be affected by the experience.
Once a purpose and audience are identified, the redesign process is prepared to tell a story. When I redesigned a client’s administrative website, the purpose was to both refresh the design and connect to employees, students, and the higher education community. From here, the process shifts to design. Knowing that employees, students, and higher education are the target audiences, how can the design invite these user groups into the digital experience? This project’s answer was in information architecture. Figures 1 and 2 present two narratives directly connected to the audiences. It gives access to specific content each audience will find valuable. Content in Figure 1 connects audiences to initiatives and plans whereas content in Figure 2 connects audiences with resources that correspond to their community role. Clear headings direct audiences to content. The labels “Employee Resources” and “Student Resources” specifically invite audiences to engage with the content. In comparison, content in Figure 3 represents the website’s experience before the redesign. Its story is unclear and unintroduced, not organized for any particular audience.
Outcome
Crafting the story of a digital experience is not a linear process. It requires cyclical processes of research, information architecture, content strategy, and design to effectively draw the audience’s focus and provide the content that will support them. Approaching website redesigns with a storytelling lens ensures audiences are able to access relevant content in the design.