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GE has more than 45 public Web sites-and that's just in the US. Metropolitan Life, more than 35. ExxonMobil has 15 or more. It's a common phenomenon-these are companies with complex, global Web presences that include many brands, audiences, purposes, and service offerings. However, it's not hard to see the likely drawbacks to this scenario. If strong brands and satisfying user experiences are the keys to winning hearts, minds, and revenues in the online marketplace, then what happens when those brands and user experiences begin to multiply out of hand? Brand dilution, mixed messages, and inconsistent user experiences, says Eliot Phillips, director of interactive services at Lippincott Mercer.
Phillips' article follows the saga of a financial services information provider that is going through the process of organizing all its sites, around the world, into what Phillips calls a Web constellation. The company began by doing an audit of its Web presence, with an eye to several parameters: consistency (much lacking within and across sites), communication (the corporate portal, for instance, offered only minimal explanation of the company's international presence and businesses), personality ("dry, distant, passive, and officious"), content ("riddled with jargon and acronyms"), usability (most transactions took more than 15 clicks to complete), visibility (though a dominant player in its industry, the company's name did not appear in the top 100 results in 24 out of 40 browser searches), technology ("a system integrator's hell"), and management ("predictably, there was no one senior executive responsible for the company's entire Web presence, nor was there a corporate-wide Web steering committee").
Audit in hand, the company began by confirming each site's purpose, audiences, relevance, and value. It then established criteria to ensure that each site would accurately reflect the attributes of the corporate, product, or service brands, and continued by identifying and prioritizing sites that needed to be created, enhanced, pruned, or eliminated. Much time was spent analyzing sites' traffic and usage patterns, fielding customer surveys, and conducting focus-group research to make sure the company had an accurate picture of its audiences and their needs. Benchmarks were established to measure whether a site was delivering value-in hard and soft terms-to the corporation and was worthy of continued investment. While this was going on, a team of information architects were set to work to determine the most appropriate organizing principles for its informational and transactional sites.
Lastly, the company turned its attention to defining "user journeys" that it expected its various audience types would take when traversing its primary sites (the corporate information site, a B2C information/commerce site, and a B2B information/commerce site). The information architecture team developed detailed schematic illustrations for all of the unique page types within each of the primary sites. This would prove to be instrumental in usability testing and for ensuring an efficient user experience design process.
"Most members of the Fortune 1000 have dozens of Web sites," Phillips concludes. "With respect to optimizing our organizations' Web constellations, it is up to us-as brand stewards and communications leaders-to shoulder the responsibility, enlighten our colleagues, and drive the effort."
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