I find myself falling into the trap of thinking that designing a standard, informational website is a “solved” problem. You put a main navigation on the site, fill it with labels that capture the things that you can offer people, add in an “About Us” and a “Contact Us” section, and you’re good. Don’t use hard-to-read color combinations. Don’t bury important information. Get to the point. Or, to put it in a really boring and worn-out way, usability professionals aren’t going to find this “low-hanging fruit” anymore.

That just isn’t the case, from small mom-and-pop businesses to huge national brands.

Although I spend a lot of my time thinking about incremental improvements to sites, there are unfortunately still plenty of chances to make bold leaps in site performance. These are the situations that often allow usability professionals to put on the business analyst “hat” (which is pretty much the same as the “business therapist hat”). Sites that are confusing down to their core are probably the product of people that aren’t sure of the purpose of their site… at least, putting those goals into specific and explicit terms.

A down side of these situations is that you may end up coming back with recommendations for improving the site that amount to “scrap this site and make a new one.” How do you make tactical improvements to a site that’s got foundational problems?

I don’t have a good answer for that, because I think every situation is different. It comes down to managing expectations and negotiation, though. Redesign may be out of scope for a project, but it doesn’t meOKan that you can’t raise the issue. And what can you focus on in the meantime to improve the site that is currently there?