In my last few posts I’ve tried to demonstrate the importance of discovering what your target consumer wants in an increasingly consumer-driven market. Today I want to turn away from social CRM as a tool for uncovering that information to how we can better develop brand engagement channels, and especially websites, to improve the user experience. Just as it’s important to know what consumers want and tailor your products to their desires, it’s also important to ensure that every form of interaction they have with your brand is driven from their perspective and shaped to appeal to them.

With most creative assets, and especially websites, you have a limited time to get your message across to your audience and, by following these steps, you can ensure you are headed in the right direction. When developing a website, the entire process should be undertaken with a deep understanding of overall business goals, project-specific business goals and the perspective of the end user. Perform an initial assessment focused on discovering and understanding these aspects, including who the intended audience is and what their challenges are. This is the only way to create design that is truly for the people.

Ask yourself these key questions:

• What is the ultimate goal of the project?
• What will be the call to action?
• How will you define project success?
• What do you know about who you are marketing to?
• What are all the current marketing actions being taken or planned for the future?
• Who are the competitors and what are they doing?
• What are the probable preferences/goals/intentions of our intended consumers?
• How can we help our consumers achieve those preferences/goals/intentions?

These questions will help you begin to discover your company’s strengths and determine consumer needs. From there you can start to define a clear road map of what kind of architecture, look and feel will have the best usability and produce the best results.

Although the questions above are not the only important questions you’ll need to answer, they will give you a great jump start on designing for the people. This type of process might seem like common sense as you’re reading this but many companies ignore these basic steps in the development process, designing only based on their own internal perspective. That type of design results in user engagement that feels awfully one-sided and is likely to be unrelated to what the user is seeking through the site. Instead, strive to develop an experience that recognizes and gives value to user needs and you’ll really be designing for the people.