On July 2, there was an interesting article in the New York Times, that discussed a new wrinkle in the successful design of some new shopping centers in Texas and other Southwestern destinations – the developers asked women what they wanted to see.  Here’s a quick excerpt:

The women weighed in on dozens of features, like the center’s layout, landscaping, parking options, pedestrian walkways and outdoor art. The developers “asked us about every detail, and then they listened.”…

Listening to women shoppers may seem like an entirely logical thing to do, yet many retail developers and consultants say such participation is often missing during the early stages of shopping center development.

I was immediately struck with the parallels when considering web site development – these two short paragraphs provoke four important corollaries to the web site design process:

1)   Identify your audience: I haven’t seen the stats, but I’m sure that the core constituency of suburban shopping centers is women, including a sizable number of mothers with children.  In the world of web site design, this should be an initial factor that you’d want to clearly identify.

2)   Drill down to the details: In designing a web site, it’s often the use of specific words, icons, visual cues, or interface elements that will define a positive experience vs. a negative experience for the user.  An example used in the shopping center analogy was walkways that could readily accommodate multiple baby strollers side-by-side for a hassle-free experience.

3)   Listen to user feedback: If you’re going to take the time to solicit these ideas, they should likely be heeded, rather than tossed out in the name of expediency or professional expertise.

4)   Get user participation early: True, it may be easier to re-engineer a web site post-launch compared to a shopping center, but by gathering user input early in the process, you’ll have a valuable set of assumptions to build upon which can minimize project swirling and ultimately lead to a better product.

A final point in the article was that instead of relying on formal questionnaires and focus groups, the developers chose to engage their consumer advisors with informal box lunch get-togethers.   This kind of approach buttresses a regular Flightpath principle which is that you don’t necessarily need/want formal (read: expensive) consumer testing in order to gather valuable user input.

- Jon Fox