Is the web design you want the one you need?
By: UX Designer, Robyn Bragg
Designing a website to suit both organizational and brand requirements can be challenge. We’ve got tips from an expert on developing your design, effectively working with stakeholders and maintaining a consistent look and feel.
Agreeing on a visual design is one of the most difficult parts of a web design project. People have strong opinions, and these opinions are much more personal and subjective than at any other stage of the project. Part of the challenge is that most stakeholders don’t have a good framework for judging designs. They know WHAT they like, but not necessarily why so discussions devolve into warring opinions about what looks good, and lose sight of the bigger picture.
However, design professionals know that design is more than just making something look good (though that’s important). It is as much about problem solving as about aesthetics and keeping the problem being solved in mind when discussing designs will go a long way to keeping things on track.
A good web design must do several things at once:
- Communicate your organization’s unique brand and personality
- Make you stand out from your competitors or other similar organizations
- Support the functionality planned at the wireframing/UX stage of the process, by providing cues to functionality and enhancing usability e.g.
— — — — Provide a clear hierarchy of information — Do the most important tasks or pieces of information stand out?
— — — — Indicate how the site works — Does the design provide visual cues to the functionality of the site?
— — — — Draw attention to key tasks — Does the design draw the users’ attention where you want it to go? Does it help the user find what they need? Does it let them know what they should do next?
It’s important to keep these things in mind as you move through the design process.
Sometimes what you want isn’t what you need
Often clients fall in love with a design idea or a layout from another website and want to copy it closely as the basis for their new site. While collecting examples of designs that you find inspiring can be helpful, you should expect your designer to explore and unpack these designs before launching into your design. And that’s because the example websites, as much as you love them, may not actually be the best design for your site.
Here’s why:
- The personality/brand of the organization may be totally different to yours
Consider the example of a discount retailer who loves the feel of luxury goods sites. Or an organization that prides itself on credibility and quality that really likes quirky fun designs. In both of these cases, there’s a brand mismatch.
Tip: Think about what you want the design of your site to communicate about your organization. Do your example sites make you feel the same way you want your customers to feel?
- That design you love may be solving a completely different business problem than the one you have.
For example, many of our clients love the Apple website design. The site is beautiful and well-aligned to Apple’s business goals: to sell a small catalogue of products to consumers. The site inspires desire for Apple’s products through aesthetics and emotions, putting the emphasis on large, beautifully photographed product imagery.
Mimicking Apple’s user experience approach or design philosophy won’t work if you have a large catalog or a lot of dense, technical information.
Tip: Inspiration can come from anywhere, however, it’s important to not get too attached to the details of any one approach. Consider the business and design problem that is being solved and make sure its aligned with yours before trying to mimic a design. What are your particular business or design challenges? What sites solve the same sorts of challenges well?
- You may not be able to support the design you love
Designs always look their best when they have come straight from the designer’s hands, with perfectly chosen photographs, carefully crafted content and just the right amount of text. Some designs fall apart once they are released into the wild. Maybe you don’t have an in-house designer to curate and adjust your images, or you don’t have the budget or resources to select an image for each news article, or your content authors add five times the amount of text that was planned in the design.
Tip: Think about content realistically as you evaluate designs. What will be required to maintain the design? Do you have the design skills on staff to support an image-intensive approach? Is the design using the real content and images that you will be using after launch?
None of this is to say you can’t take inspiration from unusual sources or websites with different goals, or brand identities. Some of the best and most creative projects have unlikely inspiration. But in these cases the designs aren’t slavish copies of existing designs. Instead they strive to understand the underlying reason that the elements are attractive. They pick elements that will work well in the context of the new site, keeping the overall organizational and user goals in mind.
Help us keep the design discussions on track
Design discussions can be challenging. Without a strong focus they can devolve into “design by committee” the process by which a design, in trying to please all the stakeholders all the time, loses it’s initial vision and impact. (See the video at the end of this post for a funny take on the issue). One way to fight this is to keep a strong focus around the design’s objectives.
- Ensure the right people are in the room for the initial creative brief and design requirements discussions. If there is an executive or stakeholder who will have final approval of the designs, make sure their input is included from the beginning. This will prevent churn and major revisions further on in the process.
- Have a small team evaluate and champion the designs. Have a core group of 2–3 stakeholders who are empowered to approve designs. This group should have solid background knowledge of the project so they can understand the designs and defend them to the wider organization.
- Establish clear goals for the design. Get buy-in from the core team on a set of objectives for the designs. Use these objectives to judge the designs through the rest of the process
- Work iteratively. Use tools like Style Tiles to quickly iterate design approaches in order to reduce design churn
- Make sure you present to anyone who can derail the project as early as possible in the process. Have the designer on hand when approved designs are presented to key stakeholders or a larger group. They can help remind stakeholders of the design’s goals, defend design decisions and back up the core team
- Keep feedback on point. Make sure that all feedback comes back to the key questions: “Is this on brand? Does this meet the design goals we agreed on? Does this support the overall purpose of the website? Is the design helping or hindering the users tasks?”
- Stay focused on the big picture and avoid getting caught up in small details. This will prevent project churn and delays.
The best designs come from a clear vision
Good designs are holistic. A strong design has a clear vision ensures that all elements of the site work together to create a consistent look and feel throughout.This consistency makes the website easier to use since users can depend on things looking and behaving the same way on all pages of the site. It can be tempting to fuss with small details, but it’s important to make all design decisions with the big picture and overall goals in mind. If not, you end up in the situation below, and it’s not pretty!:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wac3aGn5twc
