All stakeholders picture the website in different ways
Setting the scene
Our content strategy is called Flightpath. It’s a shared set of guidelines that evolves over time; as the business flexes so does our strategy.
Before we started strategising we needed to audit our content and meet our stakeholders to understand their requirements (we’ll talk about the audit in another story). We met with 31 colleagues from a wide range of teams including Digital, Loyalty, Marketing and Legal. Their team objectives ranged from digital acquisition to customer experience onboard our planes, and everything in between.
They all had very different KPIs and the consider many diverse customer needs; these include learning about our products, understanding our prices, easily solving questions, and understanding what makes the Virgin Atlantic proposition different to other airlines.
With our interviewees being so different it wasn’t a surprise that their answers covered such a broad range of things, but there was one question where the variety did surprise us:
How do you see the structure of our site?
We gave participants a blank piece of paper and asked them to sketch. Some put pen to paper instantly and thoroughly enjoyed the task. Others sat there awkwardly not really knowing what to do before we gave them some reassurance that ‘nothing you draw or write is wrong’.
Four types of scribbles
Although everyone had their own way of drawing things we found that the sketches could be grouped into four themes: flows, site structure, wireframes and outliers.
Flows — These sketches depicted the site as a series of decisions that take the user down one path or another. All of them included the booking flow, some also included content-led routes. They show a focus on the customer journey through the website.
Site structure —These showed the site as a series of sections and subsections. The level of detail varied greatly from sketch to sketch. You could summarise these as mini-audits of the website or visual sitemaps.
Wireframes — These were sketches of the homepage using boxes and text. Some of them included flows of where you could go from the page. It was interesting that this subset of our interviewees saw ‘the site’ as ‘the homepage’, some didn’t even note that there were onward pages to navigate to.
Outliers — There were four that were difficult to categorise; a page of written notes, a sketch of a closed door, a list of complaints, and a line drawing that starts with ordered tiers and ends in chaos 😬. These reflected frustrations with the status quo, often stemming from failure to have their business needs in the past. On the surface, these sketches were quite negative but actually gave us a good insight into the disconnection between some teams and the website.
Making sense of it all
We learnt that lots of people don’t like sketching, especially when they are being watched (but that wasn’t a massive surprise). More usefully for our project, we learned:
○ That people don’t know the size of the site and were surprised when we later told them how many sections and pages we look after. People kept missing off whole sections that they’ve never noticed or found. It made it clear that if anyone in the business is to have a complete picture of the website it would be us.
○ Stakeholders mostly just care about their own areas. Everyone is busy and browsing parts remote parts of the site isn’t ever a priority. This makes sense and emphasises the importance of people understanding how to push their product and procedure updates to the content team.
○ That we needed to simplify the website because if our own colleagues don’t understand it, how will customers?
