Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

Which websites would you say are a delight? For many it's Amazon, Google or the BBC. How important is it for your website to evoke this reaction?

The answer is that in the competitive world of attracting the fickle internet audience to your website ... and to return time and time again, it is vital.

Delight is achieved through a combination of look, structure and the right content:

• The look of the website, what is often referred to as the creative design element. If your site looks tired and dated, visitors will exit quickly. A good design on the other hand can impart the "feel" of your organisation - are you business-like, or casual, or arty - and is an important part of a user's experience of your website.
• The structure of the site - the Information Architecture - has to be well designed to support what users will want to do on your site, to allow them to find the information they are looking for, or easily buy the products they want. Nothing is worse than having difficulty finding what you want and then having a tortuous online shop with a registration form that asks you your life history. Web users don’t have patience with poor websites.
• The contents have to be well designed, meeting the users' needs and written for the web. And the products have to be relevant.

This doesn’t mean that you should try to copy your favourite websites - you have to provide delight in the terms that are relevant to your audience, for your contents. And there have been a number of cases where trying to be "an Amazon" or "a Google" has led to very expensive mistakes. For example, Amazon's site only works for them because users visit so frequently and are used to the busyness and complexity of the pages.

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Interestingly, there has been some debate recently about whether user delight should be a goal of Agile project management. I'm with Nik Silver on this - that Agile is about the management of software development, whereas user delight is about the product design - the creative rather than the software implementation.