Usability is a topic that's often taken for granted or viewed as a matter of mysticism and instinct. The web guru puts his or her finger in the air, checks the entrails and then pronounces whether your site 'works' or not. Ian Delaney looks at a better approach.

Thankfully, Tuesday's course here at Westminster University helped to shed a little light on the matter. Jane Austin conducted a one day introduction to User Centred Design, explaining some 'guerilla' approaches to improving usability in existing sites and commissioning better ones in the future. A toolkit, if you like, for producing sites that work.

It would be tedious to list the day's proceedings - which could easily have been stretched to two days. But two things stuck out for me as being especially useful.

Persona development and Scenarios - imagining people who might visit your site and how their desires and goals might intersect with your own business goals was a useful way to think about how a site's content might be justified or rendered useless. If you can't imagine the person who might click on a certain item, then you have to start questioning whether it should be there. Austin brought in the example of a corporate site which featured a video introduction from the CEO, a feature that had a attracted two clicks in its history on the site, presumably from the CEO and his or her mother.

Similarly, exercises in cognitive modelling and, taking it further, reverse cognitive modelling really helped to stress the importance of getting other people to look at your information architecture. While 'common sense' can go a long way when it comes to designing usable sites, it's sometimes hard to tell where common sense stops and blind faith in your own suppositions take over. Having other people - people who resemble your intended customers - look at your content inventory and sort it according to their own instincts can prove an excellent corrective to the over-enthusiasm of insiders and designers.

Speaking of designers, both I and one of my fellow delegates found it curious that there was little talk of the look and feel of sites during this session. It seems from Jane's experience in Information Architecture that both designers and coders come quite late to the construction process. My own background in more traditional publishing would bring in designers very quickly into the construction of a new product. Clearly, there would be advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. I suppose, in an ideal world, designers and coders would be fully involved in usability testing in order that the functionality and appearance of a site matches the needs, profile and goals of customers. Back in the real world, involving people from other departments or agencies from the early stages might either be logistically over-demanding or punitively expensive.

At the risk of blowing our own trumpet too loudly, I learned an awful lot in a very short time and I'd recommend the course to anyone involved in designing or commissioning sites. It's very rare that we get the chance to reflect on our professional practices away from the rush of getting the next project out of the door. However - if you'll forgive my cliches - it's necessary to take a few steps back in order to work out the best way forwards.