The internal experience, or IX.
It’s our shorthand for an often overlooked — yet equally important — audience for every project. These are the employees, the content managers, the people who spend their days helping to maintain a web property or presence.
At C2, we understand how vital this audience is to the success of any project. Creating meaningful experiences for our partners, their staff, and their end users is one of our core ideals.
Every project has its target audiences, typically end users with task-oriented goals we're trying to make easier to accomplish. This is only half the battle. The key to long-term and sustained success relies on the internal experience of the employees who work with a given solution on a day-to-day basis. Without effectively adressing the goals, tasks, and energy of this team, efforts to deliver the perfect user experience are, unfortunately, heading down a tough road.
Here are some things to consider when assessing the needs of internal audiences:
Who manages the managers?
Who is/are the individual(s) that will manage the users who maintain site content? This is an important question to consider for groups with different departments who will be managing their own content.
How many external audiences do you have?
Making sure employees target key audiences with a variety of information types and personalized content leads to better results and more engaged employees.
Maintaining a consistent message is important.
Nothing ruins a user's experience quicker than a mixed set of messages and calls to action. Making sure your internal users can build pages with a consistent look, feel, and message will go a long way toward creating optimized experiences for your target audiences.
Simplicity is key.
What different types of content are employees managing? How will they go about managing it? These are really important questions. For example, if you manage a large amount of data via spreadsheets, not allowing your content manager to upload the file or requiring documents to be uploaded one at a time will make for a lousy experience. This could lead to content not being updated as promptly or as often as it should.
What are your business goals?
Great UX happens when user goals align with business goals. If employees aren’t 100% sure what your business goals are then they can’t effectively manage a site and provide content that best aligns with the goals of your target audiences.