Website Architecture Part 4
Website Architecture Part 4
Last time we talked about funneling visitors from your homepage, with an example of a multi product mortgage company. The example contained minimum amount of choices so we got away with a fairly simple solution. If your company offers more than a dozen of products, you will either have to dock the sections to the navigation, offer a drop down menu or guide visitors in multiple steps.
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In our last example we had a customer named Koana who wanted to refinance her mortgage. We can assume that Koana found what she wanted on our homepage and clicked on "refinance" - going to the refinance page.
At this point we need to go back again and look at different types of "Koanas" there can be.
Koanas can be:
Spontaneous
She might want to apply without ever going through the copy or caring about the company. This may be because she:
- already visited
- wants to get it done as fast a possible
- doesn't care too much
In that case it is a good idea to place a large "Order" button or in our case "Apply Now" button.
Methodical
She may want to know the step by step process of refinancing. How it is all done, the charges, paperwork, rates etc.
Competitive
She might be interested in what you can do for her as a mortgagor. How the refinance will help her, why is it better then all other mortgages and why your company in the first place.
Humanistic
She may be interested in what the company done for other clients. Has it helped to build happy families and long lasting home? Or the kids foundation?
The modes
Most likely, our buyer will switch to different modes during the process, since our product is very expensive and requires long commitment.. Koana will jump from being Competitive at the start to Methodical mode, sniffing out information about the process. If the website satisfies that mode, she might want to find out if the company helped to build happy homes, hence jumping to Humanistic. She might as well close the page and go shop elsewhere. Not having found a better choice, she might come back ready to buy, looking for that apply button, switching to the spontaneous mode.
Your products may differ and not involve multiple modes from one person , but at different points you will get different visitors, with different mindsets and requirements. It is always a good idea to design for all them.
Here is the outline of our structure for Refinance mortgage and for 4 modes that Koana might have.
It is safe to assume she will most likely be competitive at first. She will want to know if the company is worth spending time on. At that point, an opening paragraph with some of the biggest benefits and features that satisfy that mode will be perfect. Also offer a link to "About Page" which is there to convince visitors why us instead of them.
Down below we can insert longer paragraphs for the methodical. Describe the refinance process(with a link to more detail), talk about basic charges and of course some benefits.
For the humanistic we can offer one or two short stories on the right/left side pane. Not in the main copy, but docked on the side and visible enough. There we can feature some happy real life faces of home owners and their little stories of refinance.
For the spontaneous we put a large button somewhere it can't be missed. This also ensures that people can see where to apply when they need to.
We could go further and use the right/left side panes to further extent to address and feature more content for different modes if there's enough room.
In the copy we anchor links to the main questions anticipated during the process, since it is impossible to answer all of them at once. In order to find the questions relevant to the topic and asked by Koana, we can do keyword research and extract data from there. Google offers a wonderful keyword research tool, where by adding questions:
- Why
- What
- Who
- Where
- Why
to the term of our interest, Google will give actual questions that people searches for. It is very safe to assume that our visitors either researched the questions, have them or will have some of those questions as they move along the process.
Within our copy we can include links to answer those questions,.
to be continued.
