IPA: Providing a Rich User Experience

How do you create a website that entices visitors in, engages with them and delivers the content they want to see in the format they want it? You ask Senior to design and develop it for you!

Ensuring user engagement is the Holy Grail for most websites. A richly populated website with well written content is certainly a great start; so is a site that’s easy to navigate and locate relevant content. What the IPA needed however, was a site that would excite its members and other visitors.

Rather than simply reacting to the content a website presents to them, users are increasingly looking to tailor and dictate what and how a website presents that content. Realising this, the IPA asked Senior to develop a website that would allow registered visitors to do one of two things:

• Explicitly select the type or subject of content that most interested them
• Personalise certain elements of the website
  

With this brief, Senior set about designing and developing a system that would provide visitor preferences as well as a personalised homepage delivering internal and external content to one central point.

 Visitor Preferences and Profiling

Not content with simply asking visitors to tick a series of boxes for what sort of content they would like to see, Senior developed a clever method of tracking their viewing habits and placing more prominence on content they might be interested in viewing.

When tied to the visitor’s explicitly stated preferences, this implicit ‘profiling’ of content provides an effective and transparent means of widening a visitor’s exposure to the wealth of content on the IPA’s website. Profiling is a subtle addition to the more visible navigation elements on the site that help visitors discover content.

Personalised Homepage

The IPA was keen to explore methods of allowing their visitors to personalise at least some areas of the website; we suggested providing them with homepage that would allow them to decide what sort of content they wanted to see and where on the page it appeared.

Providing personalisation on a website can be problematic, especially given the limited tools available. We wanted to allow users to drag and drop ‘widgets’ containing content such as news, events and jobs around the homepage and began by exploring the standard tools within .NET to deliver this functionality but this proved to be unsatisfactory. Senior felt it could do a lot better itself and promptly developed a smooth and extremely usable alternative.

Senior’s new drag and drop widgets pull content from within the IPA website itself and also from external sources such as RSS feeds. Users can add new widgets, reorder them by dragging them around the screen and remove ones they don’t need; and because we store these preferences against the user’s profile (instead of in a cookie on their local computer), their personalised homepage will follow them to what ever computer they view the website on.

The IPA website is currently undergoing usability testing; you will be able to see the fruits of our labours when the IPA website launches to the public in early 2008.