Atlantic Business Technologies, Inc.

Category: User Testing

  • The Most Important Step in a Website Redesign Project Plan

    The Most Important Step in a Website Redesign Project Plan

    You want to redesign your website! It’s tempting to want to jump right in and skip to design and development. However, skipping this important step could lead to costly delays, budget overruns and poor user experience. In fact, according to IBM, fixing problems in development costs 10 times more than fixing them in design, and fixing them after launch costs 100 times more. What’s the secret behind every smooth, on-time, and on-budget, user-friendly and all around successful website redesign project plan? 

    It’s the often-overlooked discovery phase. 

    In web and portal development, this early stage sets the foundation for everything that follows. It’s the hidden ingredient that ensures your project aligns with both your business goals and user needs, all while maintaining the budget and timeline that you sought to begin with. Without it, your project risks falling short of expectations, whether through misaligned priorities, user frustration, or missed opportunities.

    What is the Discovery Phase?

    The discovery phase is the first and the most important step in any web development project. It’s the process where we dig deep into understanding both business objectives and user needs. The discovery phase is about balancing these two critical elements—because a product that only satisfies one without the other is destined to fall short. By the end of this phase, we develop a detailed blueprint that guides the design, development, and launch of your product.

    At its core, discovery is about uncovering the following:

    • Business goals: What are the business drivers behind the redesign? Are you looking to increase conversions, improve brand perception, or enhance functionality? Defining these goals early ensures your redesign stays on track.
    • User needs: Who are your users, and what do they expect from your website? Gathering insights about user behaviors, pain points, and preferences will guide the redesign toward a user-friendly solution.
    • Technical requirements: What are the technical constraints or opportunities that need to be addressed? Whether it’s integrating with existing systems or ensuring site scalability, the discovery phase ensures your project plan is technically sound.

    The Benefits of a Comprehensive Discovery Phase

    Skipping or minimizing the discovery phase can lead to a number of issues that derail your website redesign. However, when done correctly, the discovery phase sets the foundation for a successful project. Let’s look at the benefits of a discovery process.

    1. Meeting Deadlines

    Without discovery, unforeseen technical challenges or unclear business goals are almost guaranteed to arise during development. These issues cause wasted time and missed deadlines as the team scrambles to address problems mid-project.
    With a clear roadmap from discovery, the development team can work more efficiently, reducing ambiguity and minimizing the need for rework or adjustments mid-project. This ensures the project stays on schedule.

    1. Budget

    Projects that skip discovery often face scope creep, where new features or adjustments are added without a clear plan. As the project expands unexpectedly, costs spiral out of control and the budget can become unmanageable. By establishing detailed requirements from the start, discovery helps prevent scope creep, ensuring that the project stays within the agreed budget and avoids unexpected costs.

    1. Clear Business & User Requirements

    Without a proper discovery phase, the project may proceed without a clear understanding of business objectives or user needs. This often results in a final product that fails to meet its intended goals, requiring expensive rework or leading to a failed launch. Discovery ensures alignment between business goals, user needs, and technical feasibility, reducing the chances of miscommunication and ensuring that the project meets both business and user objectives.

    1. Stakeholder Alignment

    Skipping the discovery phase often means key stakeholders are not involved early enough, leading to conflicting goals and last-minute changes during development, which can delay the project and increase costs. Discovery brings stakeholders into the process from the beginning, ensuring that all departments and decision-makers are aligned. This prevents conflicts later in the project and fosters smoother collaboration.

    Discovery Phase in a Website Redesign Project Plan

    Website Redesign Project Plan Timeline

    Without further adieu, here is a typical Discovery that you can incorporate into your Website Redesign Project Plan. 

    Let’s take a closer look at the key components of the discovery phase and how each contributes to the project’s success:

    1. Stakeholder Interviews: Understanding Business Goals

    Before any design or development begins, it’s crucial to gain a deep understanding of your business goals. This is done through stakeholder interviews, which are 1-1 meetings with key decision-makers and department heads to uncover what the business hopes to achieve with the website redesign.

    Stakeholder interview

    Key Questions Addressed:

    • What are the main objectives of the redesign? (e.g., increase conversions, improve brand perception, enhance user experience)
    • What are the current challenges with the existing website?
    • What business metrics or KPIs will measure the success of the new website?

    By engaging stakeholders early, we make sure that the redesign is aligned with the company’s larger strategic objectives. The insights gathered here lay the groundwork for the entire project, keeping business goals front and center throughout the process.

    2. Technical Audits: Ensuring Technical and Design Feasibility

    Before moving into design and development, we conduct technical audits to assess the current technical landscape and identify any constraints or opportunities. This step ensures that the technical and design decisions made during the project are realistic and feasible within the existing infrastructure.

    What a Technical Audit Includes:

    • Current Site Performance: How well is the current site performing in terms of speed, security, and scalability?
    • Analytics: How much traffic is normal for your website? Are there any common usage spikes?
    • Content: How many pages exist? If the URL structure changes during discovery we will also need this for our redirect plan. 
    • Technical: How much customization is there? Are there existing integrations we need to account for?

    The technical audit helps to identify potential risks and ensure that the new website will perform as expected, without encountering avoidable technical issues during development. This stage also highlights opportunities for optimization, such as improving site speed, enhancing security, or making the site more scalable.

    3. User Research: Understanding User Needs and Pain Points

    A successful website redesign isn’t just about meeting business goals—it’s also about delivering a seamless experience for your users. User research plays a critical role in understanding who your users are, what they expect, and where they encounter frustrations on the current site.

    Key User Research Activities

    Usability Testing: Usability testing is  aimed at evaluating the effectiveness, efficiency, and overall user-friendliness of a web site or application. We use real users and walk them through typical tasks to understand their pain points and behaviors.

    User Personas: Personas are semi-fictional representations of your target audience. They outline the demographic details, behaviors, needs, and goals of your users, helping the design team keep the audience in mind throughout the project.

    User Journeys: A user journey map visually illustrates the steps a user takes to achieve a goal on your website. By identifying touchpoints and pain points, we can streamline the user experience to make the website more intuitive and user-friendly.

    This research ensures that the redesign solves real user problems and creates an experience that meets their expectations. A user-centered approach leads to higher engagement, better satisfaction, and improved business outcomes.

    4. Information Architecture: Building the Structure of the Website

    Once we understand the business goals and user needs, it’s time to structure the website through Information Architecture (IA). IA is the blueprint that defines how content and information are organized across the site.

    Key IA Activities:

    • Sitemap Creation: Mapping out the main pages and subpages of the website, ensuring that users can easily find the information they’re looking for.
    • Content Hierarchy: Determining how content should be organized based on importance, user needs, and business priorities.
    • Navigation Design: Designing an intuitive navigation structure that helps users move through the site smoothly.

    Information Architecture is the backbone of your website. By organizing the content in a way that aligns with both business goals and user needs, we ensure that users can easily find what they need, and businesses can guide users toward desired actions, such as purchases or inquiries.

    5. Requirement Gathering: Keeping Track of Functionality

    From the moment discovery begins we must document all functionality into a requirements gathering tool such as a requirements matrix. This involves documenting the business, technical, and user needs uncovered during interviews, user research, and technical audits and assigning priorities based on project scope and timeline. This ensures that the design and development teams have clear direction on what the website must accomplish and how it should function.

    Business Requirements: Essential features or improvements tied to business objectives

    Technical Requirements: Platforms, tools, or integrations required (e.g., CMS, CRM), Performance, security, or scalability considerations

    User Requirements: Features or flows critical to enhancing user experience

    The requirements matrix organizes and prioritizes all these elements, helping the team focus on what’s most important and avoiding scope creep. This structured approach keeps the project on track, within budget, and aligned with both business and user goals.

    The Outcome of a Discovery-Driven Website Redesign Project Plan

    By conducting these steps during the discovery phase, we develop a comprehensive roadmap that serves as the foundation for your website redesign project plan. This roadmap outlines:

    • Clear business goals: Ensuring that the website redesign delivers real value to the business.
    • User-focused strategies: Ensuring that user experience is at the forefront of design and functionality.
    • Technical and design feasibility: Making sure that all design and development decisions are realistic and based on a solid technical understanding.

    This detailed plan ensures that all teams—whether design, development, or UX—are working toward the same goal, with both the business and its users kept at the center of every decision. With this roadmap in place, the website redesign stays on time, within budget, and aligned with business objectives, creating a website that performs for both the company and its customers.

    Ready to kick off your next website redesign project the right way? Atlantic BT can guide you through a discovery tailored to your business needs. Let’s talk!

  • Why We Included User Interviews in Our Website Improvement and So Should You

    Why We Included User Interviews in Our Website Improvement and So Should You

    Websites are not static objects, they need to scale and change as your company grows. Before long, websites can become stale, outdated and accumulate technical debt if left unattended. Therefore, website improvement needs to be a regular part of every company’s business practices. It can be difficult to know what parts of the website needs improving or agree internally which parts should be changed. User Interviews can be a big help in deciding where your organization should focus its improvement efforts.

    You Don’t Know Until You Ask

    Atlantic BT recently decided it was time to update the website to reflect our change and growth and reflect the needs of our users. Like many companies, our internal stakeholders had differing opinions on how the website should be redesigned. As a B2B business, we want to make sure our website is a pleasant experience for the people that make the decision to use our services. We weren’t sure any of our ideas for the website would actually accomplish that. 

    The solution may seem obvious, but the best way to find out what problems, desires and goals your customer has when interacting with your website is to ask them. So we did.

    How We Did It

    We didn’t just throw out a survey to a bunch of clients and website users either. That kind of research will tell you whether they like your website or not, but not why. So the results still wouldn’t help much with how to change your website. We asked five of our clients to do a user interview, a user experience method where researchers conduct one-on-one sessions with users to ask questions about a product or website. You can include either established clients or potential users within the same demographic as your clients, although you will get differing results. 

    Established clients will be able to tell you what they love about your company/product/service and whether your site represents that well. Potential clients can give you a fresh perspective on your website. They can tell you whether it is understandable right away without any background knowledge. 

    During our user interviews, we gave our clients tasks to complete and spoke aloud as they walked through the website, revealing what they did and didn’t like about it.

    Users Provide a Valuable Perspective

    Clients and customers can offer feedback with unique insights that may have never crossed your mind. During our user interviews, we found out from our clients that the navigation and content around our services was overly technical, which overwhelmed them. It turns out, our services really only made sense to people who work in the technology industry, which only make up a small percentage of our clients.

    Previous Atlantic BT website menu, included a lot of terms users did not understand.

    “I really think you should dumb down this menu with easier to understand terms. I don’t know what ‘application development’ is”

    Atlantic BT Client

    On the home page, users either skipped over the Services content altogether or had a few choice words about it.

    “I wouldn’t read this section the way it is now,” one participant said.

    “I probably wouldn’t spend too much time on this,” said another participant.

    Users skipped over Atlantic BT’s Service section on the home page.

    To fix the problem, we restructured our menu and service offerings to include more user-friendly verbiage. We organized our services by user needs, by our expertise, and by technology that we use. 

    User Interviews Can Align Team Members

    It’s very compelling to see first-hand what your clients, users, or customers think about your website. Having direct quotes makes the issues that they bring up difficult to ignore. When shared with team members, their insights can help get your team to understand problems with the website, prioritize and follow through with the plan.  

    After our user interviews, our team was able to come up with a strategy for the services on our website. Our new services section used more straightforward terminology and simplified the number of services to key ones that our clients understood.

    Atlantic BT’s new Services section after including user research.

    Summary

    When you work in an industry for a long time, it can be easy to forget what is common knowledge and what isn’t. This can make it difficult to know whether the content on your website is understandable or usable. When in doubt, it’s always a good idea to ask your clients for their opinion. Conducing User Interviews as part of your research has the following benefits for websites:

    • Determine if your messaging is resonating with your audience. 
    • Pinpoint specific problems in the website that need to be addressed
    • Discover if information is findable, intuitive and engaging. 
    • Align members of your team to what changes should be made.

    Contact Atlantic BT

    Annie Tudora has a Master’s degree in User Experience Design with years of industry experience to match. If you’re interested in learning how Annie’s expertise could help you build a more user-centric website, let’s chat. User interviews are a great place to start.

  • Why User Testing is Critical for UX

    Why User Testing is Critical for UX

    Disjointed user experiences are a widespread marketing pain point, according to research conducted by Gartner. User testing is a powerful tool that can help businesses identify and rectify these disjointed UXs, enhancing website performance and ultimately leading to improved customer satisfaction and increased conversions.

    “Siloed UX approaches based on traditional channel mentality are preventing organizations from delivering a seamless digital customer user experience to internal and external audiences,” said the company. 

    In the past, user testing was a complex process, and it often involved collecting volunteers into labs and using high-tech solutions such as eye-tracking cameras. These high-tech solutions, of course, had high costs to go along with them. Luckily, times have changed, and companies are now offering a new generation of usability testing solutions and strategies.

    In Gartner’s report entitled, “Drive Seamless Digital Customer Experiences with Composable UX,” the company noted that a better strategy around customer data management and customer journey intelligence is needed to make composable UX attainable.

    What is Composable UX? 

    Forbes has noted that composable UX helps businesses keep up with the lightning speed of change. It flexes as circumstances shift, allowing for the real-time assembly, combination, and orchestration of individual customer employee experience capabilities from a robust set of building blocks: product, marketplace, CX ecosystem, and development. It’s labeled as “composable” to differentiate it from the brittle, inflexible user experiences of the past. 

    Why Is User Testing So Important?

    In order to serve your customers and enable your employees, you need to know what their needs are before you can begin to address them. (Guessing seldom works out for anyone.) User experience testing, of course, is the process of testing different aspects of the user experience to determine the best way for a solution, a website, or an app to interact with its core audience.

    The following are some of the most critical processes that must be undertaken to engage in effective user testing: 

    Usability testing. This involves putting a website to the test to see if usability problems are stopping your users from reaching their goals.

    Contextual inquiry. During this step, you’ll uncover opportunities for improvement by watching users interact with your sites and products.

    Surveys. There is no substitute for asking users directly about their experiences, so in this stage, you’ll gather large-scale feedback from customers on the questions that you need answers to. 

    Tree testing. This is a way for you to visualize your user experiences (as a decision tree) to figure out where your navigation might be confusing for users. 

    Card sorting. Understand how users group your content by hearing straight from them how they think your topics should be organized.

    Benchmarking. Learning from the best is still a great way to gain insight into the design of the user experience. Perform large-scale user testing to compare efficiency and effectiveness between different designs.

    Consult a Professional Web Design and Development Company

    If you’re in doubt, it’s worthwhile to turn to professionals to jump-start the user experience testing process.

    Atlantic BT is an award-winning technology firm located in Raleigh, NC. We offer enterprise web design, IT consulting, software development, cybersecurity, and cloud technology to help clients easily manage, secure, and scale their core technologies. We combine full-service digital transformations with custom software development and technology solutions. Our awards stem from outstanding results in all aspects of digital, from UX design to modernizing applications. For more information on how we can help improve your website performance with user testing, contact us or call us at 919-518-0670. 

  • Does your website need to be more functional or usable?

    Does your website need to be more functional or usable?

    The simpler the website design, the easier it is to use. The more functionality a website has, the more useful it can be. With website design and development, the focus needs to be on maintaining a balance between usability and functionality to maximize user satisfaction.

    People need to have access to features that help them complete tasks, but they also have to be able to easily find these features. Plus, they need to be able to comprehend how to use them.

    What makes a website usable?

    A usable website has a simple experience. It’s easy for people to find necessary information, complete tasks, and learn how to use features.

    What makes a website functional?

    A functional website has many operational features. Maybe users can add items to a favorites list, get a price quote from a calculator, make online purchases, or filter through content with search.

    Achieving a usability and functionality balance pays off in website design and development.

    If you can find a way to hit the sweet spot of balancing functionality with usability, you’ll reap the rewards. Crafting a this sort of experience with website design and development means:

    • Increased customer satisfaction
    • More online conversions
    • Boosted brand loyalty and positive word of mouth
    • Reducing frustration that leads to poor word of mouth or people calling support

    Why do people clash over functionality and usability?

    Usability and functionality can be considered a tradeoff in website design and development. It’s not easy to design a website to perform complex tasks while being simple enough for its intended users to handle. 

    You’ll have to face tough questions like: Are some features taking away from others? Are they cluttering the website? Can people find the feature they need? Can the average visitor use the feature easily?

    Usually, designers will push back on stakeholders during this step. While a stakeholder wants to add as much functionality as possible to pages, a web designer needs to remind them that if everything is urgent, nothing is urgent. It’s a team effort to optimally prioritize elements of a page.

    Testing is an essential step in website design and development.

    Good UX is not about adding more features/options. It’s about improving interactions based on how a user wants and needs to engage with the system.

    But how do you know what the user wants to start with? Most businesses incorporate a discovery step before development. At Atlantic BT, this phase includes UX workshops where we map tasks a user would perform on the site, interview or survey for more information, gather additional website requirements, and determine Information Architecture.

    However, after Discovery, the best way to ensure a website is satisfactory is to test a prototype. You need to test what a user will actually do in a scenario (not just what they say they’ll do). For large projects, Atlantic BT tests prototypes of a research-based design to monitor usability before a launch.

    Research, design, and testing can feel overwhelming.

    Handling large website design and development projects in-house can feel overwhelming. Atlantic BT can help. Our streamlined process includes the careful research, requirements gathering, and testing needed for successful launches. Reach out for a free consultation.

  • Leveraging NLP for Better Survey Data & Customer Satisfaction

    How often have you found yourself frustrated when answering a survey? Perhaps you were not presented with an option that covered your case or enabled you to raise your concern. Maybe you wished for a place to provide more detailed information.

    In either of these situations, that firm could not get useful information to improve your experience with them.

    Why Should I Include More Open-Ended Survey Questions?

    While multiple choice responses are straight-forward to analyze with clear trends in responses, it only leaves room for answers to questions that the survey writer anticipated. This is okay for some questions, such as yes or no, how many times, Likert ratings, or questions with only a few possible responses.

    For other questions, like “how do you feel about our product?”, it’s nearly impossible to anticipate any adjective a person would want to use.

    Furthermore, with multiple choice for such a question you are limiting responses in a way that manipulates data. You could lead the survey taker into submitting a misleading response by forcing their selection into predetermined categories.

    Multiple choice questions can help you identify a problem, but they rarely provide enough insight to help you solve the problem.

    Open-ended questions allow respondents to provide answers in their own words, focusing on what is important to them. With no restrictions on their response, you can identify new issues that you would not have thought to include in your questions.

    In addition, this kind of open text feedback will often contain information about context (in which circumstances an event occurred) and additional detail (exactly what happened).

    The Challenge With Open-Ended Question Analysis

    While open-ended questions can provide a wealth of meaningful information, it takes a great deal of time to analyze them properly. In fact, User Researcher and founding partner of Adaptive Path Indi Young, plans for 8 to 10 hours of analysis time for every hour of recorded interviews or text read at natural speed. We have found this estimate to be realistic.

    Why does it take so long? It takes time because you don’t know what you are looking for – you will know the valuable nuggets when you see them, but only analyzing all the data will provide the patterns to reveal them. To do this, you have to:

    • Go through every word in the responses
    • Identify the topics that are mentioned
    • Identify the labels people are using to distinguish those topics
    • Map different labels people use for the same things
    • Repeat the process for adjectives and modifiers
    • Identify how they feel about these topics, positive, negative, or neutral
    • Discern contexts that clarify the meanings
    • Extract relevant details that can be used in developing solutions

    This process may seem like overkill – if you have a dozen or two short responses most people can read through them and take away one or two key points. However, if you have hundreds of responses, or the respondent can go into detail and provide longer answers, then you rapidly obtain more information than can be usefully processed merely by reading through them.

    A structured analysis, aggregating the detailed responses from many participants, can reveal insights that might easily be missed in small samples. However, few firms have the resources to provide that kind of analysis on hundreds or even thousands of responses.

    When to Incorporate Natural Language Processing for Surveys

    Fortunately, machine learning-enabled algorithms have developed to the point where much of this analysis can be automated. The process is called Natural Language Processing, or NLP for short. While it can’t do everything listed above, NLP can be of great assistance in two major areas: 1) Topic Analysis (what people are talking about), and 2) Sentiment Analysis (how they feel about those topics).

    Using NLP to perform that preliminary work of topic and sentiment analysis can give the research team a great head start and allow them to instead focus on what human experts do best – assimilate those results and then look at the contextual information and details to glean valuable insights. Furthermore, it reduces human error and bias.

    A Real-World Example With Amazon Comprehend

    During the Discovery phase of projects, Atlantic BT frequently uses surveys to conduct user research. Recently, we needed to analyze responses in a survey performed as a part of brand research for a pharmacy school.

    In this instance, Atlantic BT was working with 800 responses from hundreds of participants. At an average of one minute per response, simply reading through all these would take 13.5 hours, or two full days. And that’s before performing any analysis – remember the point above about proper analysis taking 8 to 10 times longer? That would mean that a fully manual analysis of that content would take three weeks!

    Instead, we chose to use Natural Language Processing to perform the basic topic and sentiment analysis, which allowed our research team to rapidly identify key areas to focus on and research more fully. We chose Amazon Comprehend as the NLP tool to use.

    Why We Chose Amazon Comprehend

    Amazon Comprehend is a service that uses machine learning to draw insights from text. You could use this tool to identify positive or negative connotation or to pick out specific phrases within responses. According to Amazon, full capabilities include:

    • Identifying the language of text
    • Extracting key phrases, places, people, brands, or events
    • Understanding how positive or negative text is
    • Analyzes text using tokenization and parts of speech
    • Automatically organizes a collection of text files by topic
    • Building custom sets of entities or text classification models that are unique to your organization

    As Atlantic BT is an Amazon partner, we find that Amazon Comprehend is compatible with our other toolsets, is continually being improved, and is very cost effective.

    What We Learned Through Natural Language Processing Analysis

    Once the full analysis was complete, Atlantic BT’s user research team was able to draw conclusions that helped drive a website redesign and content strategy.

    Eight major topics were identified as reasons for wanting to attend this pharmacy school. Further research, such as cross-validating these insights with other sources such as search terms, Reddit and other methods, enabled us to refine our insights around these topics. Understanding the motivation behind prospective students in selecting a school and program is critical to boosting the conversion rate of these low-volume, high-value transactions of both applying to a school and finally selecting that school from those that approved their application.

    Just a few examples of the insights gained include:

    • Deep Motivations: While things such as national rankings are of obvious importance, we learned more about how motivations and decisions were shaped by a key influencer in the applicant’s life; the stories related in the responses were extremely helpful in identifying content topics which would resonate with and reinforce those motivations. These factors often influence decisions around programs and schools to which they will apply.
    • Natural Environment: While not necessarily something one would think about in selecting a pharmacy school, the comments made it clear that proximity to a lake and other outdoor activities was a differentiator for many applicants. Factors like this can make a large difference in turning an offer into an acceptance – which is very important when most applicants have been accepted by multiple schools.
    • Multiple Value Propositions: Students must now make a complex return on investment calculation when considering their career options against student debt. Things such as dual-degree programs could save a year of education, a variety of programs can offer opportunities to improve specialization in the field of pharmacy and thus expand career opportunities. Responses identified these and more as important decision points.

    These types of themes were leveraged to create engaging content, matching the needs and motivations of prospective students towards the end goal of increasing quality applications and acceptance into the pharmacy school.

    Need Help Conducting User Research?

    Atlantic BT is well-versed in user research; conducting user and stakeholder surveys is just one phase of our Discovery process. Contact us to learn more about our UX Research and Design services.