"Farmers Vs. Cowmen"

"Farmers Vs. Cowmen" - Is a sentence from the referred book and below is my review, recommendations -

I found this topic very interesting and thought provoking since it is directly linked to the way that our mindsets are molded by our educational/professional background. The way different professionals visualize the website is accurately captured. Having a core technical background, I can see how developers would come up with an interface that has state of the art features. This topic is helpful in exposing the inherent likes and dislikes and direct our thinking to what works and what doesn't work.

From recent interviews (email based) conducted for a website IA project at my company, I had opportunity to collect information related to this point of view from the management, marketing department and the lead developer. As far as web and web design is concerned, management wants to portray corporate building on the main page. I was astonished with this requirement. They want the same to be displayed on all pages too. They also want the web site to be task oriented. The marketing department wants the web site design to support excellent customer service via usable site services such as quoting and case management. The lead developer wants to implement the state of the art technology such as advanced DHTML effects, Ajax and web 2.0 features.

The top executives and management thinks that most of their users would be the existing agents, carriers, employees and employers who take part in various insurance programs. They want the prospective clients to visit the website and become partners. The marketing department on the other hand, seems to lose focus on prospective clients since they do not exhibit need to provide detailed portray of company info, business process, technology and capability. This is one of the major areas that I recommend to be stressed in the IA strategy - means which would increase revenue from the website by attracting prospective clients.

Reference:

Krug S. (2005). Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition.

(c) Deepesh Joseph, 2004-2009