The design process for a website often begins by wrangling with the real estate on the home page and carving it up according to your organization’s internal structure and politics. The homepage is becoming less important, however, since users may land on a program page or a calendar page before anything else, having been directed there by a search engine. Or, a user might follow a link in one of your Tweets or an email and land on a specific report, program page, or blog post.
Because of this fact, you need to consider the core content for your site and the onward paths available to your users on every core content page. To do this you need to discern what information users seek out on your site (core content) and ask yourself what you want them to do next after consuming that content (onward paths). Then give them the opportunity to do that easily. This practice can encourage exploration of your site beyond the user’s landing point and can help you convert casual users into stakeholders.
Learn more about this unique approach to user experience design in this article by Ida Aalen, a senior UX designer at Netlife Research in Oslo, Norway.
