I’ve been kicking around the idea of redesigning my homepage and blog, though I’m not sure I really have the free time to do it. To start, I thought I would to put down a few thoughts about applying usability principles when designing blogs.
When you starting thinking about usability it’s temping to jump right into lists of principles and rules of thumb. It’s a little silly applying Fitt’s Law when you haven’t even established what you want your site to accomplish in the first place. So what, generally, do you want your blog to do?
Personal Goals
- Share thoughts and work with others
- Collect a body of work to represent myself (like a portfolio)
- Collect information for later discovery (by myself and others)
- Provide an outlet to continue practice writing
- Allow others to communicate with me and comment
If you’re creating or redesigning a blog for a company, the goal set may be very different. Below are some examples that don’t actually apply in my case.
Business goals
- Communicate with customers
- Build long term relationships with customers
- Produce quality content to drive search traffic
- Generate revenue through advertising
- Etc.
Many projects don’t even get this far before the graphic designers and web developers are already making mock-ups, but we still have one more important step to do. We know why you’re building a blog, but why are users coming to it?
