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Brian Noonan
Senior e-business consultant
The Ameritas-Acacia Companies |
The easier an interface is to use, the harder it was to design
by Jean Greco and Jesse Berkowitz
Five years ago, The Ameritas-Acacia Companies created a dedicated e-business division to nurture online relationships with their external and internal customers. Web site management had been previously conducted by the company's IT department and individual business units, but these efforts did not include the marketing team.
Admittedly, and not uncommonly, the company's Web sites were going in many different directions. Marketing and branding coherence were missing online for this nationwide provider insurance and financial services. Enter Brian Noonan, a marketing/PR graduate with an eye for usable page layout from his former work as a journalist.
| "My passions are consistency, good formatting, and readability...easy-to-scan text is essential for the Web. Writing has to be very well done, with the right amount of content and information." |
"My passions are consistency, good formatting, and readability...easy-to-scan text is essential for the Web," says Brian. "Writing has to be very well done, with the right amount of content and information. How much people will read depends on their motivation, so you have to understand your users. User-centered design is a critical success factor with the evolution of the Internet and Web-based applications.
"We wanted explore the strengths and weaknesses of our various sites, and we knew HFI is the company to talk to about usability," Brian says. "There was no consistency across sites since each department was doing its own branding. We identified a real need to document standards to guide our redesigns and simplify ongoing maintenance."
The company formed a design team to create content standards and styleguides. This process took several months, from drafting to posting and publishing, supported by insights from an HFI expert review.
Today, Ameritas-Acacia incorporates marketing practices into its Web writing and employs a more formal data gathering methodology. Yet the end goal is to design an interface that the user won't even have to think about. Brian likens effective usability to a good referee: "If you don't notice the referee, that means he's doing a good job. In the same way, an interface shouldn't get in the user's way of accomplishing what they came to do."
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