As recently as 5 years ago, it was not unusual for site redesigns to begin or at least share 50/50 with the product group, whose content, and customer experiences dominated the project.

Today its not unusual to do a site redesign without product involvement beyond validation of rewritten and re-purposed content contained within a  navigation, and presentation focussed on a customer segments needs and expectations.

Here Charlene at Forrester summarises her new report on that topic.

What do users want from their content sites? Unique content does matter, but the basics – such as clear navigation, easy-to-use search, and ads that don’t interfere – matter more. Personalization has its role for a certain group of people but often suffers from abandonment.

To figure out the right mix of features, and to prioritize design and development efforts, content sites should aggressively employ

• personas,
• site reviews, and
• design standards,

to ensure that they provide their most valuable users with a good experience.

Source: Forrester Research: Creating Good Online Content Experiences