 It's reputable, that can reflect poorly on their experience of you and their attitudes for you. And then, finally, another potential benefit is establishing competitive parity. If you, again, if you look at the landscape of your competitors and you see that your site is sort of up to something above, that starts to reflect on your ability to effectively present yourself and conduct business in a kind of impactful way. So there are some definite cases where a redesign is very, very critical. However, those things can talk about a lot. What doesn't get talked about maybe quite as much, obviously it has, but not as often as some of the costs. And these are reasons not to do it. But these are things to consider as you consider any investment. So obviously they are expensive, not just in terms of the dollar or the cost, but also in terms of people cost, and time cost, and the other things you can do when you're not going to resign. Obviously, very time-intensive, not just in terms of the project, but building a business case might take months. It might take a long time for a vendor. So for that reason, the benefits of a resign are often delayed. You might not see the actual resigned cycle live for six months, a year, two years. So because of that, that's one of the sort of key areas I'm going to talk about today is what you can do, in the meantime, to kind of help get where you need to go. And then the final cost that maybe doesn't even talk quite as much is when you're doing the redesign, it's like a 10,000 point AB test, where you're changing so many different things. And those things are difficult to measure. If you're changing your homepage, if you're changing your applied page, if you're changing your program page, whatever those things might be, whatever industry you're in, that's a lot of change. And during that time that you redesign everything, it's very difficult to kind of assess the forms of a specific page against one of the new pages, partly because they could not do the same pages anymore. So it can be very difficult to show the value and show the actual impact of the work that you've done. So considering the costs and benefits, when does a resign make sense? Some things that are difficult kind of optimize your way out of work and fix and patch are obviously things like the experiences fractured and disjointed, they are totally designed. You're fighting for the system, it's that feeling. Mobile experience is poor, so as your device size changes, if the experience doesn't effectively kind of modify itself to fit the mobile experience, it's probably a good sign that there's something structurally happening if you're not able to fix. And then finally, changes are hard to make. If you don't have the tools that you need, you don't have the layups that you need in order to get a really, really strong design, a strong design. You're not fighting the system, you're fighting the whole time, never able to get the result that you want. However, those things are true of a lot of people. We hear that all the time from our clients as they say, I can't make the changes I want, I'm always fighting with it. There is actually a lot you can do in the meantime, even when those things are true. Because a lot of times we'd like to live in a world where we have access to all the money and the tools we want, but sometimes we don't. So if the underlying structure is not effective and you can't sort of tear it up and start again, there is multiple things you can do right now that will have a demonstrative and positive. So some of the reasons why it's useful to start making changes to your site before a redesign, why it's useful to actually house it, kind of like an investment in that is, first of all, you see an immediate result. Rather than waiting for a design, we might be literally waiting until the kids are out of college or something along those lines. You see your results right away. You also realize that if it's at a lower cost, obviously hiring an agency or getting any kind of redesign project underway, that's a very, a very time-intensive project. Whereas making optimizations is actually typically very relatively cheap and fast. It also helps you gain agency and control. So if you're making optimizations to the site rather than kind of wholesale changes, it helps you gain the power that you need to know your site well. So even if you decide to do a redesign, you're coming to that redesign as knowledge where people might be asking you, what's wrong with your site or what have you tried, you can tell them. These are the things that I've tried. I know my site pretty well. I know what these issues are and I know, I have some of the knowledge of what makes a better request for getting in my site. And just in general, developing a culture of improvement. We talk to a lot of folks who say, there's nothing I can't do. My site's kind of, you know, it's broken. I can't really do much about it. But it's actually often not true. Developing an internal culture of continuous improvement helps you kind of gain that sense of power over your site if you're not kind of helpless. But instead, you actually have the ability to effect changes. And then finally, preparing effectively for a redesign. At some point, you're gonna be doing one two years from now, five years from now. The more you've done to your site to improve it, the more you come to that project and powers and knowing where to start, knowing where to step in and giving what you do internally or with a vendor, giving the folks who are gonna be doing that work the knowledge they need to have a really strong understanding of the site's issues. So what things to stand in the way for people doing ongoing optimization? Because we all know we shouldn't be giving, but why don't we? Well, some of the bigger problems are lean team loans. So the common challenge is out of time, I don't have resources to make changes to my site on a regular basis. I can't change design, design's locked in. Or I'm not a designer anyway, I don't have the expertise or the knowledge to make these changes. If you're making them in an arbitrary fashion, I'm not sure which ones I should be making. So how do I know which ones to make? However, in a way it's kind of like the perfect becomes the enemy of the good is that when you're in that state of stasis and not changing things, obviously, the site itself continues to be added to you. The site is not getting better, the content of the pre-foral, many people are contributing to it and it's not really gonna govern or organize in an effective way to where the changes that you're making are strategic and deliberate, they're just changes. And then a third thing that happens when you're in that state is, Google Lips is there, but it's more of a guilt engine than recommendations engine. It's kind of, sometimes you're scared to look at it, almost like you're scared to look at your garage, because you know there's something scary in there, but you must be helpful in there. But you kind of cease to kind of to treat your site like a tool or like a strategy tool. It's kind of just a place you put your content. And that'll be the last piece, which is no real strategy or way forward. You know that there's something that you can fix, but you don't necessarily have a deliberate approach to doing that. So I'm gonna talk about some steps you can take. These are examples, there are other things you can do. I'm gonna talk about UI specifically, but these same principles can apply to the CEO, they apply to accessibility, they can apply to performance, any thing that you see that's in your way that you want to improve as an old school. So when you think about making progress toward a better user experience on our current site, you definitely don't need to be a designer. You don't even have to have full control of the page to improve UX. You can start with some simple principles that are almost always true about user experience. And that is focusing on a few basic concepts. These aren't the only concepts. There are a few basic concepts that will meaningfully change your site on a sort of weekly, daily, monthly basis. And some of the ones I want to highlight are reducing, simplifying, and emphasizing. We all know these are true. We'll talk about some specific ways that we can use these simple principles to improve with our sites. So the UX guru, Steve Krupp says, one of the best things they can do for UX is just care of this stuff. Kind of like a garage example, just clearing things out. Users are constantly fighting with us presenting more information than they want. If race is not within the order that they want, too much of it, especially on mobile. So getting rid of half the words on every page and getting rid of half of what's left. A kind of ruthless program of defenestration and reduction. Hey, yeah. So it's actually true, and this is where learn helplessness, but we're in that state where we don't know what to change or we're free to change something or we've kind of gotten used to not changing something. Is there, it doesn't actually require a UX certificate or a fancy title. When in doubt, cut it out. Using your gut. Like, I don't think anyone's going to call this a great UX, most likely. If it feels long, it is long. When you're looking at it, the other thing that's very important is even if you're in an enterprise, like need to be, situation, and most of your customers use desktop, still to look at it on mobile, look at it on the smallest screen possible and just see what a torturous, painful challenge that can be for people, especially as often modern design means very long narrative features that can be quite overwhelming for people. So look at your site first on mobile for many reasons, but particularly to understand the length and the amount of information you're presenting them and whether that is, if you're actually telling them the things they need, or if you're actually kind of giving them a sort of overwhelming experience. So that's another sort of balance. So you're definitely breaking up long coverups and we might think of long coverups as like five sentences. Sometimes it's like two or three, especially in a mobile device, a few words, a hundred words can appear very large. So the more that we break things up into little chunks that people can digest and understand better. That's majority of people who don't really read and just sort of scan and read on those by ourselves. So breaking those things up. The other kind of key elements of reduction are using head usable. These all seem like common sense, but we see all the time that they get missed. So just taking the same kind of flow of content, especially in deeper pages that get neglected off the video, adding headings, adding bullets to bring it up so that it feels like people can scan it in one second or they can take two minutes to do the whole thing. So that's kind of like the dual lens that you always want. You always want to give the people that two seconds scan so they can kind of get the idea that they just did it. But then they can dig in if they want to and they're probably gonna dig in if they understand the gist of it. And then finally consolidating items. Consolidating content, consolidating evidence, putting important content at the top. Even at the very top of the page, you might just summarize this page is about if it's very long. Just to help people understand, do I want to commit to this? Do I want to read this? Is this useful valuable information? Or the key, the top three or four points at the very top. So for years, it's been very fashionable maybe even sometimes in a Jackson than this once or twice. It's made very large menus and lots of options. Put everything on the table to spread it all out and give people all the options. What I've noticed personally from many, many user tests is that people have a visceral, kind of like psychological adverse reaction to that. Because when they're presented with everything at once, they just get frozen, they get stuck and they get stressed immediately. So the more we can kind of selectively show people a small number of items that are in that kind of, it seems like content, but it's so easy to do. We think we have so many programs, we have so many products, we have to show everything. But do you? The more of a special way to use mobile devices, we realize we're trained out, kind of drill down, but then stand across. That's often the most effective way to do it is to get people, give you an entry point, the first place to start. And from there, they can decide whether they want to continue, whether they want to explore laterally, however they want to make their way through the site. So that's reduction. Of course, they didn't cover every element of reduction. We get the idea. None of these things require deep knowledge of the subject area. They require you to take a common sense approach to your content, look at it objectively, maybe even have a friend or a coworker who doesn't know the page that well, look at it, and start to think about ways that you can bring it down into a managerial amount. The second one is kind of related, which is simplification. I mean, who doesn't want that? Very few people stand up on this point, I would say called the page site or it seems kind of obvious, but bringing all the key information that people need into one place, making it very easy to scan. So fewer options, consolidating content, turning the text into table, for example, turning content into bullets, using call outs, leaving a little bit of color background for something that is more important or different that you want to highlight. And I'll show you example of a call out in a second. So I'm gonna use a few higher education examples, but they're not, you know, these principles can fly to absolutely any sector. So when I've shown this page actually to prospective students as far as user test before, and the reaction is usually, you know, wow, amazing. To me they're like, what do I do? I don't understand. There's a lot of content here. And sometimes when we look at a page as experts in our content, we think this is easy. There's not that much to know here, but they read it like very, very important to realize that our users are just not naturally experts in the content itself. They're going to be starting from scratch. And we need to guide them through like a handsome, brittle, breadcrumb trail to get to where they want to go. So here's an example. You may not be high-designed, but you get the idea of chunking like a table of costs into one short little piece of information. Don't need any text to explain it. A little, a couple of call outs on the side to highlight some of the key things that otherwise would get buried in the text. If you have to read it to find it, you probably won't find it. So just taking a bit of a visual approach to the information, can I take this information? And instead of presenting it in a Proustian narrative, can I turn it into four chunks that people can really get and understand very fast? The third UX principle is emphasizing. This thing's forgotten a lot or missed a lot. It's not enough to make things simple. We actually have to tell people what to look at. So we have to help users understand what's important and where to look. We are lazy, everyone is lazy, it's just part of our human nature. We want to be able to take the content that is critical and use size and color and space to draw the eye toward it. That's one of the value of things like CTAs or even calculating content in color, a different size, whatever it might be. These things, you might sometimes look at it as eye and think, why are they doing that? Why does this need to be a different color? It's because of the principle of encapsulation. The things that stand out towards visually, we jump, our eyes jump toward them right away, and that's the kind of thing that we want to be drawing people's eyes and people's attention to right away. So put things that are important at the top. Use size and color to draw the eye toward key things, top things, and use highlighting and encapsulation. You don't have to use blank time if you don't want to, that's the best idea. But in some way, disrupt people's typical cognitive flow to get them focused on the key stuff. So this is an example, not that this would be an up-to-ear-all appeal. You might even recognize them, probably not in your own sense, I would hope. But it's a common date. It's very true that people often look at their homepage or their valid page and they say, those look pretty good. But then you start looking deeply into, let's say, your software, your resources. If you're a university, you look at your deeper program pages, you almost certainly see something like this. And that's where the challenge comes in for users because they often need a lot of information and a good decision. You're not just going to look at your top-level pages. So we take that same content and think of ways to break it up, use big headlines, wrap things in a color to kind of give people the sort of key information they need. Maybe use an image, and not just a decorative image, an image that actually, oh, the geo question there. Oh, just a few. Not just a decorative image, an image that actually reinforces what the content is to help people always understand what they're looking at at all times. If you think about simplifying it, it's not just about making things easy. It's about kind of reducing the amount of intellectual effort required. Almost treating users the same way that we want to be treated. I was like spoon-feeded to me, giving the information I need easily and quickly without very much fluff. So, one of the biggest challenges and one of the reasons that people often decide to do a reside is my CMS sucks. It's not to replace another CMS. I can't change anything as I. Like, whoever made this is just locking me out. I can't do the things I need to do. Very common problem, and it's a real challenge. And nothing I've said here today precludes the idea of actually doing a reside because sometimes we're blocking any kind of changes. Even when you're in that state, we've had people say to us, are redesigned two years away, so I'm just gonna let the site be and I'm just gonna step away and let it kind of blow up because there's no point doing a reside in two years, but there's always something to do. So this is an example of another page with just a real wall of text that I think the vast majority of people, 90 plus percent of people, aren't gonna read unless they're highly motivated. If we have a strong designer and a CMS that is capable of making changes, then we can probably solve this problem fairly easily with some like changing mock-ups, it could be up to a good understanding of what the new version would look like, but sometimes we might have that. So we might do something that may not be dramatic for us. It might look very similar, but actually makes a big difference. So just cutting this, I should cut this text down to about half. Bolded, the first sentence. The first sentence here didn't really make a lot of sense, so I just completely changed that. And thinking through how can we, with very simple kind of non-sophisticated tools, start to tailor the experience in a way that helps people get what they need quickly. Less is going to make a huge difference. A bit bigger size is gonna help people understand. You don't have to read all that stuff over there. You just have to read that first sentence and you get the idea. So all of these things are designed to kind of reduce the intimidation factor of making changes or design, and also provide a sense of purpose. Like you can do this. There's a variety of things that you can do on your site. It doesn't have to be pages of content. It could be an application. It could be the images that you choose, whatever those might be. But starting with some of these high-impact areas, so your top pages. The top kind of user training. All those different things. And if you're not sure what to change, a really useful thing you can do is, well, you can look at competitor sites or example sites whether you're competitors or some competitors, and just kind of, you know, that starts to give you ideas right away. You say, oh, that's how those guys work, I like that. I can use that. Or doing a simple usability test. That's often, a lot of times if you're stuck on what to do, a usability test will give you more ideas than you have time to. You probably get years worth of ideas by saying, you know, two or three people. Like, oh my God, and I've thought that was a problem. And you'll see things you wouldn't have seen before. And then finally, shooting for better, not perfect. If it's 20% better, that's better. Your site most likely has thousands or maybe millions of visitors a year. If every single one of those visitors gets a little bit of a better experience, that's a massive win in terms of scale. So, many of you may have done these before, but just as an example, on a usability test. Again, like UX, and like many of these other subjects, you don't have to be a deep subject matter expert to do a good job on a usability test. You can do a simple thing, like pulling a colleague who's maybe not familiar with your site aside, or finding, you know, matching the pizza and the student, and that could be part of the course, or if you're using a strategy, of course you should pay them. Well, for that, but giving them a task, like find a product, find a program. Find a program that's interesting to you. You know, find whatever, whatever thing about your site that is your sort of top goal. Sit down with them, whether it's in a virtual setting or an individual in person setting, and just watch what they do. Hopefully, record what they do. This will give you often more ideas than you know what to do with, and give you recorded evidence that you can bring to your leadership, can bring to the owners of the budget to say, here are some problems on our site, and these are some of the things that we want to fix. The other thing you can do when doing usability tasks, is just, if you're not sure what to test, you can just ask them, what's your impression? Tell us in your, you know, what are the first things that come to your mind? What are the first five adjectives that you think of when you look at the site? If you could change one or two things, what would those be? It's very often useful to say, highlight, I think at the bottom, to have users review not just your site, maybe one or two competitor sites as well, because that gives you a baseline. If they say like, you know, your site is good, but I really like what they do in this other site. That also helps you bring a business case back to maybe your leadership or makes, if you hold the budget to make decisions about where to spend, spend that money, the more we can say, yes, this works, this does not work, that's always helpful. That makes valuation more tangible, and it gives you a baseline, say, yep, I can see that it's working, instead of just like, you know what is working, you have evidence that works. So the last thing I'm gonna talk about is, very important part is, you know, we can make a lot of changes on our site, but unless we have a kind of program in operationalized, it might get motivated, maybe other priorities we'll take over, and then we kind of end up, you know, two months later or six months later in the same spot we were before, after a burst of excitement, like, you know, January we'll go to the gym, I certainly did, and then you kind of maybe follow that practice a little bit, so how do you kind of make sure to keep going? So, the smaller the better sometimes, and not every goal has to have every element of smart, you know, the smart group, it could be just, I want to improve one page a week. Just start with anything, whatever it is, maybe you say like, look, I'm so overwhelmed, I may need a day after day, I don't have time to think about this, I'm just gonna work on three pages a quarter, whatever it is, I've still three pages I've worked on before, improving one strategic page or section a quarter, whatever length of time that is. Choose something, stick with it, and keep working on it. The other thing is, the more it looks like a project, more likely that you are to do it, the more, it's like anything, if you write down, you know, I plan to exercise, take two 2,000 steps a week, every week or, that's not 100,000 steps a week, maybe 20,000 steps, that's the biggest difference. So, when you kind of treat it like a project, you roadmap it out, you maybe plan, what am I gonna do this week, this year, the more it becomes something real, intentional that you're actually gonna do something about it. And then the second kind of corollary to that is baking in accountability and measuring it. If you're not measuring the changes in some way, you might also get the more invades, do you think, why am I doing this? Am I actually making a difference? Maybe I am, maybe I'm not. And then of course, be open to adjustment. You might start out with one idea of what should change after a week, but then six months later, you've got a few usability tasks or you've looked at some analytics and stuff. I actually don't think this is the right place to test. I'm gonna pivot and I'm gonna change what I'm going to improve. So, everybody wants to measure. Everybody feels guilty about measuring well. Most of us do not, thank you. You know, we look at bounce rate, we look at time on page, we think, what does that mean? Is that good? Is it good? Is it low bounce rate? What's that mean? So we can absolutely use the tools that are disposal in Google Analytics or whatever tool you use. But there might be other complimentary ways of collecting analytics that might be equally powerful and actually more useful to you. You know, if you're a lead-oriented site, you can use conversion rate, that's absolutely possible. You can also use quick page arrays like what's this page useful? Especially if you have a page that's not like a slam dunk version, it's just kind of leading people to the next step. So was this useful page to you? What, how do you rate it? Zero to 10, whatever that might be. Another thing you could do that sometimes people neglect because it doesn't feel like analytics is just doing simple highway tests. Like you can use user testing to assess what's wrong. You can also use user testing to see what you fixed. So, you know, being a bit facetious here that pizza-plus student and such a worker equals cost-effective digital strategy. Having a little bit of budget, you know, I think compensation's fair for any kind of testing, will let you not only kind of measure and test effectively, but it also gives you a lot of data to come back with, especially if you record it and say like, I had this idea, this quarter we're going to improve our IoT product pages, whatever that might be. Here's what we did. Here's the test that we ran and here's what we can see as the results. Many user testing tools are not only qualitative nature. They also offer quantitative ways of measuring. For example, OptimaSort allows you to chart out the success of different tasks so you can actually come back with some quantifiable. Because a lot of folks in leadership often, they want to see data. They're not convinced when you just give them anecdotal kind of stories from users. So you can get that sort of qualitative and quantitative data from testing. So in summary, it kind of seems simple, right? Is it, why isn't it the case that we're doing it? It's because there are many factors that kind of lead us to think that redesigning sites is the only way that we can really in fact change. It's going to become the dominant paradigm. We spend $100,000, $500,000, whatever it might be, have a beautiful site and then largely kind of let it get worse. Over the next five years, and then start again. The ability to change that approach, change that narrative, so instead of letting it kind of fall down or fall apart, we instead treat any entry point with it now or after a redesign as an opportunity to keep momentum going, keep it going. Not let this thing slide into becoming another organized mess. Again, the better off will be you do not need to hire a vendor to see that happen. I am a vendor, I should probably tell you the opposite message, but I think that it's absolutely the case that we can do so much on our sites and add so much value in a very simple common sense way without a tremendous amount of subject matter experience. Thank you. Any questions, comments? There's triple modules that use quick surveys and stuff like that. Yeah, we've looked at triple modules. What we've usually found, the most effective tool is usually Hotjar. There's lots of them, there's a lot of script tools out there. But Hotjar is good because it's not that expensive. It also integrates with your team. It's just a little standard JavaScript, so there's like a, you could use any tool together to get that. It includes surveys, it includes heat maps, it includes a wide variety of different tools and an inexpensive package. You can also choose to just have it for a month or two if you don't want to pay for the whole year so you can kind of use it when you need to use it. Triple modules aren't quite in there. They're usually just because the nature of triple isn't necessarily to have a really, really strong key mapping tool. It's more of a facilitator, a better, sort of a best-in-breed, third-party user. Okay, cool, thank you so much, Bob. How do you convince people who really like lots of words that they don't need lots of words? That's a pretty good challenge. So getting stakeholder buy-in or getting over people's traditional views is definitely a challenge. One of the things that we found why we still aren't effective is kind of a combination of data and a little bit of peer pressures is a fair word. If you can organize a short workshop that hopefully even includes them, where you can actually gather people together to talk about some of the challenges on the site and data can often be a lever if you kind of get people to start to think differently or even just to start to see that, hey, I'm going to go in a thesis way. And then obviously user testing can make a huge difference in a way that Adler itself doesn't because of the subjective nature of what people can say as well. The seven page, how many seven that means? A targeted user test or a targeted kind of survey. Well, I think it'd be a lot more kind of tangible. Admission for that part of me. Thank you. Thanks a million. Thank you.