The Value of Keeping Your Clients Goal Oriented

As a User Experience Designer and the first creative on my team to interact with clients, it is my responsibility to get the project started off on the right foot. This requires documentation, communications, and flexibility.

When asked how I define my role, the first sentence that comes to mind is “it is my job to suck content out of clients…” Then, feeling obligate to speak more eloquently about what I do, my response continues: “in order to understand their goals for the site, who the end users are, and how to organize their content efficiently and strategically to achieve my clients goals and, more importantly, the users’ goals.” And whether designers like it or not, we cannot effectively design and build websites unless we thoroughly understand our clients’ content.

If you work with clients on a regular basis, I don’t need to tell you twice that getting your client to submit finalized content on time is similar to pulling teeth. And I’m not talking one tooth here, I mean several teeth. Dumbledore gets your frustration

I believe there are several reasons why clients have such a difficult time understanding the content process. One in particular:

Driving your client to become goal oriented can solve this problem.

Many, if not all, web teams use sitemaps to help both internal and external teams visually understand the navigation and hierarchy of the site. While this visualization is extremely useful, I like to take the sitemap one step further and associate “goals”, “tactics”, and “users” for every landing page (sometime subpages as well depending on the project). I call this deliverable the expanded sitemap. Let’s walk through how to create this document and why it’s useful for both your internal team and your clients’ content success.

— The goal of each landing page is intended to help guide clients to writing focused content for each page. Having a goal for each specific page makes it easier for you, as the UX/IA/content person, to dispute putting misaligned content on specific pages if it doesn’t match the goal of that page.

— Tactic = method to achieve the goal. The tactic of each landing page should be broad enough to encompass all of the content that will live on that page, but narrow enough that content living elsewhere wouldn’t make sense on that page.

— Identify the primary user group for each page. If you haven’t already listed out the primary/secondary/tertiary users of the site, DO THAT NOW (but really do that in a kickoff meeting). Recognizing specific user groups should help clients stay targeted in their copy. For example, if donors are the primary user group for one page, the language would be different than if the primary user group were teachers.

I’ve found that by keeping clients goal oriented, you put not only your clients at an advantage but yourself and your team as well. Defining “goals”, “tactics”, and “users” helps the folks producing content to make their copy more targeted and informed. Handing off an expanded sitemap to your visual design team makes it much clearer what the purpose of each page and can help them design more in line with the goal of each individual page. Finally, you are setting yourself up for success because anytime the client recommends archaic changes to the content, you can always refer back to the goals, tactics, and users they wrote to keep them on track with the initial content plan.

And when you refer back to the “goals”, “tactics”, and “users” in the expanded sitemap to stop your client from making a major content mistake, there’s no better feeling. Except maybe flying.

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