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When you're creating a web site, you need to make your visitor the center of the universe and tell them not just want you want to say, but what they want to know. Yet many sites today are
still written from a "brag and boast" perspective: "Look how great we are!" Who cares, except you?
Visitors are selfish. That's just human nature. They are not interested in you and your
business except insofar as you and your business can help them achieve a goal. Visitors are at your site because they have a problem they hope you can solve. "click a mile in their shoes” and create a
"scenario" that will help you create a more effective site for your visitor and you.
Instead of creating your Web site from your point of view, scenarios help you focus your site's content and
navigation on your Web site visitors' needs,making it easier for you to create a more successful site.
Most Web sites fail because they are written from the site creator's perspective rather than from the
Web site visitor's perspective. These myopic "brag and boast" sites emphasize the firm's accomplishments but don't present information in a language or structure that visitors can easily relate to.
To create an effective Web site, you must struggle to overcome the challenge of myopia. You must create your Web site—and present your message—from your visitors' perspective instead of your own. You must "put
yourself in your visitors' shoes" and "think like your visitors" to design a Web site that presents your message in the way that best reflects their needs.
Scenarios are short, detailed,
fictional stories you write describing typical visitors to your Web site, the challenges they face and the information they need to be persuaded to buy your firm's product or service.
Ideally, you should
create a series of four or five scenarios, each describing a typical buyer for each category of product or service you offer. Share these with your co-workers and invite them to contribute additional details that
will flesh-out your stories. Use the first draft of your scenarios as a catalyst to "brainstorming" sessions, during which you and your co-workers or staff develop creative, "outside the box"
solutions to your client or firm's problems.
The more details included in your scenarios, the better you'll be able to satisfy your visitors' needs. Details bring your story alive, helping you get a better
understanding of your visitors' information needs. Names, ages, job titles, times when they visit your Web site and specific challenges all humanize, or personalize, your visitors. Instead of thinking of your
visitors as a "faceless mass," scenarios help you think of your visitors as unique individuals with specific needs.
Limit your scenarios to one page. This makes them easy to create, easy to read
and review, easy to photocopy, easy to share, and easy to arrange in the right order. A one-page limit forces you to write as tightly as possible, avoiding the temptation to "fluff up" your scenarios with
unnecessary words. Three or four paragraphs should be enough for each scenario. Instead of editing your scenarios as you write them, immediately move on to the next. This encourages the creative, free flow of ideas,
and the process will gain momentum quickly.
By identifying a hypothetical Web site visitor's needs in detail, you avoid spending a lot of time and money on text, photographs, and animation that may entertain
but don't deliver the specific information visitors immediately desire.
Too often, Web sites are created from a design, or aesthetic, point of view that places content secondary to "image" and
"impact." These Web sites reflect an inward, or myopic, point of view that satisfies the Web site creator's ego but may not satisfy the visitor's information needs.
A key rule of marketing is to be
able to tell customers how you are different and better than competitors. That's awfully hard to do if your site looks and feels like everyone else's.
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