UX tips from a Drupal agency

We are an experienced Drupal agency based in London and Leeds. Read below for our tips and process on getting the best results from your Drupal website

We have great experience in both Drupal 7, Drupal 8 and Drupal 9. Our offices in London and Leeds help businesses nationwide with their development needs.

If you’d like to know more about how we work, our experience or how we would approach your project give us a call on 0203 603 1689

I have a Drupal site but how can I improve it?

Well, first you must understand who is visiting your site and why they are there. I know you will have an idea but do you really know how they are behaving?

We specialise in Drupal 7, Drupal 8 and Drupal 9. This powerful CMS provides stacks of out of the box functionality and has a world of modules that can be used to extend your site. We also write custom modules so we can tailor for very specific situations.

How can I find out what's going on right now?

We will look at your existing data and if needs be gather some more. Using a combination of Google Analytics, on site surveys, heatmaps, user journey funnels and if necessary small customer focus groups.

These will begin to map out from many angles how people are currently behaving on your website. These insights will help identify areas of opportunity to drive real business impact.

But, who is coming and why?

Everyone visits a website for a reason, you know that but do you know enough? We conduct a user story workshop where we map out all the audience types such as prospective and existing customers, we then list all of the tasks that these people want to carry out when they are on your site.

One important user of the website we mustn’t forget of course is…you. That’s right, this is a business tool and it needs to be able to match your needs and give you as much control as possible so you can get the best out of Drupal. That’s why in our workshops we always include your business as a user group.

So, how do I talk to my customers properly?

Your brand is whatever people perceive it to be. That is determined by the sum total of the experiences your customers have across one, some, or all of your customer touch-points. For this reason, your website is obviously an essential and influential tool to communicate and position your brand in the best way.

Drupal is a great platform but it doesn’t have any soul until we breathe life into it with your brand. We go through a brand workshop so we understand your brand persona and how that will play out on the website, through design, balance of content and messaging.

Great, how does it turn into something real?

Wireframes:

Ok, now we move into the wireframes stage. This is where we take all those user journey tasks, some of the learnings from the brand workshop and begin to explore the user journeys.

The Wireframes stage is the first and essential stage to the design-ux phase of your website development. This phase allows us to first focus on mapping out the key templates required in the user journeys without the initial distraction of design. This ensures that consideration is primarily on getting users where they want to be with the least friction.

Design:

So we know how your brand wants to communicate and now we weave that into the wireframes. We select the right tone of voice to encourage, support and direct people. We balance the colour scheme so our signposting hierarchy works and we don’t confuse the audience. Again, Drupal gives us the base functionality but we shape it so that it works for you.

How do I keep on improving it?

Your Drupal website is a living breathing entity that needs to be nurtured, monitored and developed. We recommend a test, measure, optimise and repeat approach. We go back to the analytics and data, back to watching people use the site and constantly interpret the behaviour.

Then we test ideas and optimise user journeys and tasks while improving the whole site as we go. With the correct attention there is no reason why you shouldn’t have a successful website.