Finding Good Designers, Part 2: Site Goals

In part 1 of this series, I talked about the value of consistency in a site design. Today, I’ll be talking about the importance of a thorough question-and-answer session between the designer and client.

Design is not pretty pictures

Generally, the first topic that a designer should ask their client about is the site’s goals. “But what about the site’s colors?” you say, or “We haven’t even talked about my company’s logo!” Those are about the least important aspects of your site design. There’s a saying that “art is about inspiration; design is about communication.” Color, layout, logos, these are all aspects of packaging your particular message before you ship it out to your audience. Does packaging help you to achieve your goals? Certainly. But packaging alone isn’t going to get people to do what you want them to. There has to be some underlying message, a feeling that someone actually spent the time to think about what they wanted you to take away from their website. Otherwise, the result is just art – it may be pretty, and it may get attention, but it won’t drive people to action in the same way that a great design can.

Getting people to do what you want them to

As I was saying, your first interaction with your designer should be all about goals. There are several ways to get to the heart of this, but here are some of the questions I’ve found most useful in creating sites for my clients:

• “What one thing do you want people to do after visiting your site?” – This strikes directly at the heart of it. Ideally, a website should be catered toward making its users pursue one clear course of action. What that action is can certainly vary from site to site – one site may want users to buy products directly from their website; another may want users to pick up the phone to talk to a representative; a third might really just want you to sign up for their newsletter so that they can sell to you through email; and a fourth might not care about any of the above, as long as you share the site with everyone you know on Facebook or Twitter. Whatever the main action, it gives the designer a clear message to get across to the user – “if you do nothing else after seeing this site, at least do X.”
• “If your site were a film, how would you sum it up in a single sentence?” – This might sound bizarre – “how is my business site like a film?” – but with a little thought it can be very valuable. Take for example this post about UX Themes over at Boxes & Arrows. The designers needed to create a site for fans of All My Children. The site’s goal seemed clear – “be an interactive video hub for AMC fans” – but the design team broke this down into different “themes” that could each be used to create an excellent site, but each targeting a different goal. Would the site be “an interactive biography of series creator Agnes Nixon’s life told through the show”, “a personal time machine for show fans to relive their favorite moments”, or “the history of a highly-successful soap opera”? In terms of film or television, these three themes are the biopic, the clips episode, and the VH1 documentary. They all cover the same material, and they all seek to entertain the viewer, but the message they each communicate is very different. Look at Amazon.com; their one action is certainly “buy something from us,” but their theme sentence is “A place to find whatever you’re looking for, with a community where users give each other reviews of the things we sell.”
• “Who do you expect to use your site? What do they expect to find when they get there?” – These questions ask about your site’s audience, both who they are and what they like. If you sell a product with wide appeal, you’re going to design your site (and your message) very differently if your expected audience is 20-something men vs. 30-something soccer moms. The answer to this one question is going to get you a much better website for your needs than arguing about colors and logos.

Putting it all together

So, how does everything fit together? Let’s take a look at a sample client in the construction industry. We’ll call the client “Bob’s Builders.” Bob is a relatively new business, and he wants to promote himself to clients with a website. His one action that he wants users to take is to contact him about work opportunities, whether through email or phone. His one-sentence summary is “a place that shows clients that I may be new, but I know what I’m doing and I’m eager to work with you.” His expected audience is homeowners looking to hire a small contracting firm to do home remodeling.

What does this tell the designer? Right off the bat, the designer knows that the most important pieces of the site will be a work portfolio and making it easy for people to contact Bob. The site should be friendly, to appeal to homeowners who might have never hired a contractor before, but professional to show off Bob’s knowledge of his craft. Anything that appears on the site should be geared toward making Bob look like a professional and getting people to contact him. That means no Flash animations unless it’s a video of Bob explaining how to do something, and no business-speak in the site’s writing unless it’s shop talk.

These kinds of questions may seem like a waste of time, but every element of a successful design flows from a solid understanding of goals. If your designer never asks about your goals for the site, run, don’t walk, to find a real designer.