Set your goals first, design later

I friend of mine, a product developer, mentioned the article Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign. When he explained me what was in the article, I thought it was about Information Architecture (IA).

The article was published a day before and I had no idea he was talking about THAT website. And now that I read it, I still think it is about IA.

At first I didn’t understand the word “realignment”. I considered redesigning a website to be driven by a business need. But is that realigning or redesigning a website? I don’t understand the difference.

The author of the article, Cameron Moll, writes to his webmaster audience: we’re creatives first, strategists (and info architects and project managers and coders and everything else under the sun) second.

IA’s are definitely strategists first. IA’s find the goals for the redesign (talk to stakeholders, users, senior managers), match those with user needs, calculate time needed to get it done, document the process and create deliverables for the coders and the designers.

The problem is of course that most designers don’t know how to wear the IA hat when meeting with clients. Often these clients cannot communicate their goals or have no idea that a designer would need to know about strategic goals. After all we are just talking about graphical design, right?

If you can convince your clients to talk to you about goals and convince them to do first things first, you can checkmark the first two items on Cameron’s’ redesign to-do list.

Ensure a “raison d’être” exists.
Determine what level of realignment is required.

The third one, Evaluate user switching costs is actually audience research. Who is coming to the website? What are they doing? How much time do they spend? Do they leave addresses and information about themselves? What countries are they coming from?
So many questions and so little time.

You will have a hard time getting the logfiles from the servers or get time from the sales department to talk to you about customers.

The last item Determine the impact on launch plans is project management. Determine the resources needed and make sure it happens.

The webmaster who can wear the IA hat has a major advantage because he can work towards a goal. That is only possible if you push hard enough and try to convince clients that a strategy needs to be defined before attempting a redesign.

I know it is hard because it means you have to say no. The internet is no longer a “talking dog” and you and your client cannot afford to loose track.

2 Responses to Set your goals first, design later

Luc De Ryck

01/11/2005 at 12:19 pm

That’s right, you first got to set the right goals before changing your website. I’m sure this
is the right solution for the business industry.

Let’s be thankfull that a lot of crap on the net is just for free, staying there without calculating the effect on the visitor, without any attempt on evaluating the business needs.

There’s a lot of beautifull ‘design’ on the web and it’s just for free, we are so used to the
fact that all things must have a ‘raison d’être’.
Thierry Tollenboom

05/11/2005 at 5:35 pm

When I mentioned the article to you on some site I came across, I didn’t realise how big it was among webmasters. Obviously it’s huge. ;-)

Discussing strategic goals with your client is of key importance if you plan on being succesful in the long run and not a blip on the cool radar. Yes it can be hard. Often your client becomes irritated when you start asking those difficult questions. He probably just planned on telling you what to do and have you running in every direction. Now your sitting there asking: Why? To what end? Symptom busting or fundamental change?

As the saying goes: No pain, no gain.