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Making_the_Designer_Work_For_You
Making the Designer Work For You
Wanted: Web Designer.
Must know PhotoShop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, .ASP, PHP, JSP.
Needed to build ‘brochure-style’ web site for small
business.
I made this classified ‘help wanted’ ad up out of my
head, but every freelance designer recognizes it. Many
experienced clients do, too: They used to write classified ads
just like that before they learned what a designer was and how
to get the most out of the ones they hire.
This
article is a guideline for clients who plan to hire a web
designer for their business. It is also written for designers as
a guideline of what is expected of them in a world that expects
the mere ‘designer’ to wear many new hats.
First, what is a designer?
Design is a field
based on ideas and concepts. Designers do not merely come up
with ideas and execute them (more on what a production
artist is, later). A good designer works with the client to
define the problems that need to be solved, finds new
opportunities that a client may not have considered, and manages
the business resources needed to make the solution a reality. A
good designer also breathes life and vividness into what could
be merely a good idea.
The client that expects a
designer merely to layout a good-looking page with cool graphics
may get that. However, the client will get only a ‘cool web
site’ and will miss out on all of the business value a
designer has to offer.
So, how do work with a
Designer to get the most bang for, what some consider, a lot of
bucks? You get what you ask for.
If you want a
generic, thoughtless web site, then write a generic, thoughtless
classified ad.
Consider the advertisement at the
beginning of this article. The ad asks for nothing, really. I
haven’t personally met a designer that didn’t fit
every one of the graphic software requirements, and haven’t
met many that were good at all of the programming languages. So
essentially, the client has made a call for any and all web
designers that know how to make images and web sites.
Step 1. Articulate a very clear and actionable design
brief.
Period. End of story. If you get this one
step wrong, you will be asking for (and getting) uninspired,
derivative work which will impact your business negatively for
years to come. When you hire an experienced designer (and you
will, because you have read this article) they will be able to
help you distill the problem down to its essentials and even
explore issues you may not have thought of.
The
design brief contains the following information:
Who are you? What your business does
How long has your business been around and how large is it
(employees and staff) What is your niche market?
How does your company fit within the industry sector?
Objectives: What objectives does
your business hope to achieve? Be specific if you can, but if
not, let your designer help you set realistic objectives. Let
him/her know that your objectives are vague and that they need
to be defined. Are you trying to generate sales? Gather
information? Generate name and brand recognition?
Market Who is the designer trying to
communicate to? What gender, age, demographic, income… any
information you give helps the designer visualize the
audience.
Budget
Inexperienced clients hate this part. Two issues come up: The
client doesn’t know how much a web site is supposed to
cost, or the client is afraid that the unscrupulous designer
will run up the cost. The first issue I will write about, later.
For the second, I will say that the client should be aware of
who they are hiring. References help weed out the unsavory to a
certain extent. Simply understanding what you are paying for
also helps.
In any case, the cost of a designer that
creates a Golden Gate bridge made out of real gold when you only
have a budget for steel…? Alternately, the designer who
figures for a $3500 e-Commerce site when you have $1,000,000 set
aside to become the next Victoria’s Secret isn’t
saving money. What is your budget range? High, low,
target. Time Frame. What’s the deadline, what
milestones are you planning for that the designer needs to know
about? Other info that will help. (Please! If you hate
the color Yellow, now would be a good time to mention it.)
The roadmap.
Here, again, your
designer may be able to help you design the path that will get
you from the ‘Point A’ of your objective, to
‘Point B’. Do not be afraid to rely on a
designer’s ability to scrap every vision you had of your
future web site (including the daydream about the animated Flash
Introductions).
Step 2. Develop a well
articulated strategy for achieving your objectives. Also,
remember to go back after you’ve developed your strategy
and ask, "Does it actually achieve the objectives?"
Sometimes, all the brainstorming and writing will cause us to
forget what the strategy was all about in the first place.
Getting Support from within your organization
Designers and Client contacts always miss this step and always
act surprised when all their work is met with stony silence by
the rest of the organization. If you are the owner, don’t
get arrogant about your employees’ approval. I’ve seen
great designs become sources of low moral for the simple reason
that the owner was trying to shove it down the company’s
throat. If your employees / colleagues / bosses do not like a
design, it will never succeed as well as it could.
Get their input and advice. Letting your designer move in
with you.
If the designer asks for a tour of your
business and time to wander around and get a feel for your
business culture, you already know that you’ve struck gold.
Let them. Give them a hard hat if you need to and let your
insurance carrier know that this contractor is going to get
their hands dirty on your front line.
The reason why
VW Bug ads are fun, while Mercedes ads are a different fun is
not merely the car, but the culture of the organization. The
designers for both companies are geniuses not only in their
ability to talk to the target market, but to talk to that target
market about the company culture. Allow for test ideas,
experiments and mind games.
The designer’s job
is to come up with ideas that fit hundreds and thousands of
pieces of data that are coming to them from all of the steps
above. They are not merely painting a picture on a canvas that
has to have meaning only to them as artists. The designer has to
paint a picture that distills data and objectives down to
simple, communicable visualizations.
Let them play.
Let them develop prototypes, explore an idea to see where it
will lead, paint a web site idea on the side of a barn if they
feel the need. They are trying to come up with something new and
unique; something that hasn’t been done a million times
before. If you think that it is easy, ask yourself when was the
last time you ever came up with a truly new idea?
A
designer at play with your idea is a designer who is trying to
‘break the box’ that they have been thinking in. It
really doesn’t cost you more than a generic idea would
cost. Budget for it. Test the idea as much as you have
budget for.
Focus groups can be as simple as going
out with a laptop and accosting passer-bys to try out the left
navigation bar (Don’t laugh! I did that for an IBM project
once). It’s important to understand that when you’ve
been staring at a project for weeks over the shoulder of your
designer, that both of you have forgotten what it’s like to
look at your site for the first time… and have to move
through it.
Test out the ideas. Test often. Test
again.
(OK you LOVE the color orange, but all of
your test subjects hate it. Guess what?) Now, it’s time
to get your production team together.
What? You
thought you were working on the actual web site? Oh, no. That
would have cost you a lot of money to be trying to produce the
site while thinking about and creating it at the same time.
Don’t worry, though, because your production team
(who might actually be the original designer) knows exactly what
to do and how they need to do it. We promise that if you’ve
gone through all of the steps, the production phase will be much
smoother than you could expect, otherwise. Not as many
bottlenecks, fewer delays, less surprises. Launch the site
and you’re done, right?
Nope.
Hopefully, your designer is going to stick around, because
after the site is live, you’re going to be able to see the
result of all your and your designer's assumptions… and a
few will have to be changed, or corrected.
Visitor
tracking will have been worked in at the very beginning of the
project and you have developed a metric system for evaluating
whether your objectives are being met. If they aren’t, then
your ability to track visitors will pinpoint the parts of the
web site that are causing problems and your designer will have
to come up with solutions.
It’s inevitable and
it should be seen as an easy opportunity, so don’t miss it.
"I have to go through all of this? I only wanted a web
site for my business!"
You don't. And, I can
make a web site for you. I know PhotoShop and I know
Dreamweaver. I'm pretty handy with PHP and could probably get
all the code to work, though it may be bloated and slow (a
programmer could do it better and faster, but I'm just a
designer). I don't need to know much about your business, just
give me a copy of your logo and I'll paste it in to the template
I have laying around.
You want a custom design, not
a template? Not a problem. It'll take me an extra day. Flash
Intro? No problem (do 14% of your customers hate Flash?).
Are you going to achieve your objectives? Yes: Your
business has a web site and it looks cool.
Here are
some numbers to think about in comparison to design costs.
85% of all e-commerce traffic will be from Search
Engines or directories. If your site is not readible by Search
Engines, yet an objective is to generate sales, then you're not
acheiving a substantial part of your objectives.
Most Search Engines cannot read and index Flash files. Google
and a couple of other Search Engines only do it with partial
success. If your designer does not know your objectives, and if
you've told then that you want a Flash Intro, then again, you've
lost the value your designer could have offered you.
Let's say you sell widgets for $100.00 a piece and gadget
accessories for the widgets for $10.00 per.
If 100
people visit your site in a day and three people finish a
transaction for a total of two widgets and one gadget, you've
made $210.00.
Not bad. But what if I told you that
neither of the widget buyers knew that you sold gadgets, and the
guy that bought the gadget actually wanted a widget and couldn't
find it... he bought the gadget from you and thought that he'd
have the buy the widget elsewhere.,
Further, what If
I said that there was one other person that started to make a
purchase, but got confused about the form and simply gave up and
left.
Another person loved your gadget, but couldn't
find the (very obvious to you) Buy Now button. He left.
Another person really didn't feel like searching
your entire site for one widget, another came to your site
thinking that you sold widgets, but after seeing your Flash
intro, couldn't really say what your business was about at all.
He left.
Were you going at that with a calculator?
You missed at least three up-sale opportunities, chased away the
rest with their money in hand.
Now, how much does a
good designer cost? How much for a good design process? How
badly do you want that Flash Intro if you're not a local band
looking for gigs?
Part 1 of 2
About the author:
Sean Rice and Rasa Design Studio specializes in web design and
marketing for e-business sites. Rasa Design Studio provides the
'eBusiness' section of its site as a free service with articles
and tools for designers, marketers and clients. You can visit
this Western Massachusetts firm and read several of our other
articles at www.rasadesign.com.
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