How To: Increase government website traffic & boost your ROI

Having a website people can easily navigate is common sense. It can save taxpayer dollars & help your agency achieve its mission. Here's how to dramatically improve your website by focusing on your customers' needs & adopting some basic usability techniques.

You Will Need:
• An understanding of your customers' goals
• Your agency's goals
• User-centered design techniques
• Tools for collecting and analyzing your website's performance

Step 1: Identify your customers and their top tasks for your website

Step 2: Understand your goals
Understand your agency's goals & how your website can fulfill them. Aligning your objectives with your customers' needs will help you be more strategic.

Step 3: Select ROI (return on investment) measures for top tasks
Choose key performance measures & conduct a baseline usability test on your website's top tasks. Create goals to define what success looks like – from your customer's perspective.

Step 4: Design for your customers
Design the website based on top customer tasks. Use terms your customers understand, which will reduce their frustration.

Step 5: Conduct usability tests during design
Conduct usability tests with real customers throughout the design process. The designs can be paper prototypes; they don't need to be fancy. Then, use the results to make additional improvements before you launch the website or publish new pages.

Step 6: Measure the ROI
Compare your baseline usability test to your redesign measurements to see how much your site's performance has improved. Translate that improvement into dollars & time. Implementing user-centered design can reduce errors, cut down on help-desk queries & slash redevelopment costs, while increasing citizen engagement & site traffic.

Step 7: Keep listening to customers
Use web analytics, surveys, blogs, & other tools to find out how well your top pages are working. Keep making small, ongoing improvements. It all a