How to BETTER Communicate Design Decisions to Clients

• Posted: July 23, 2008
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• Author: Chris Murphy
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• Filed under: Design, Developement, Grrr, Web Strategy
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• Tags: Analytics, Design, guidelines, Strategy, Website Metrics

Communication is the cornerstone of building effective relationships. This is invariably true in business and when it comes to the business of website design and strategy, communication is critical.

In a recent recent article on Smashing Magazine, “How to communicate design decisions to clients“, writer Brian D. Armstrong laid out a five-point guideline on how to rationalize and present design for web-projects.

Mr. Armstrong opens with a fairly provocative statement:

You may have noticed that in certain business and marketing circles there exists a “backlash” against the design community. Despite the rise of attractive, user-friendly solutions, in such circles unattractive designs have somehow managed to remain at the verge of acceptance.

There are two things I would like to note about this broad-reaching statement: the backlash is not against the design community, but rather the agencies, vendors, and consultants. More specifically the backlash is a direct response to service-providers who are unable to provide solid end-to-end solutions to answer key business and marketing requirements.

Good or bad aesthetics aside, a business to business (B2B) or business to consumer (B2C) website that provides leads or successfully converts a prospect to a customer is more valuable by the simple fact that it does what it was intended to do: to market or to convert.

No amount of “business speak” by a designer agency/vendor/consultant can compensate for a poorly conceived product.

“Pretty doesn’t mean effective: statistics are your friend!”

Mr. Armstrong makes some good points in the article, the most notable — I believe — is this first guideline.

It is true that statistics are definitely your friend, but you have to be very careful on how you interpret the statistics.

The example given compares two websites from dramatically different industries. The first, 2Advanced Studios, is a design firm while the second, Perry Marshall is an author’s site. You might argue that they have similar business goals in mind, but the reality is that you cannot effectively compare these two businesses and glean true insight into what works and what does not.

Comparative statistics should be taken from competitor websites within the client’s industry or a related industry.

The adage: “What’s good for the goose…” does not apply here.

When refreshing an existing business website, your client will usually have a number of pre-conceived goals in mind.

The most typical goals are:

• Improve sales
• Capture more leads
• Build awareness (brand, industry issues, products & solutions, etc).
• Foster brand trust and build brand equity.

Your client’s business goals should be your Rosetta Stone when interpreting and establishing your baseline metrics for success, and at this point aesthetics are a non-issue. This segues into Mr. Armstrong’s second guideline…

“Every design should have a measurable goal”

I have a particular issue with this statement:

Saying that the goal is to “build the brand of XYZ” or “create an online presence” is basically meaningless to a business-minded person. A goal is only a goal if it is measurable.

I agree that brand building might seem ephemeral and subjective, but there are quantifiable metrics for this — it does have meaning for a client.

A smart business will have clearly defined what constitutes effective brand recognition and build their brand’s equity on these definitions. The brand-building activities and their results are quantifiable (see “build brand awareness, Foster brand trust…”) — “Build the brand of XYZ” is a legitimate business goal.

That aside, “measurable goals” should be a reflection of the business goals, and if you can answer the challenge from a design perspective, and provide insight through incremental testing, etc. you will have built a stronger foundation for the client to determine their success metrics.

“Your site should have one clear path”

Mr. Armstrong suggests that:

As a customer comes to your site, you want to be in complete control of the 1st thing they see, the 2nd, the 3rd, and all the way down until they accomplish your goal that you’ve set. In other words, they have entered your sites “funnel” or “chute”.

In a perfect world we would all build sites that work on this principle. The reality is that entry points into a website vary from user to user, campaign to campaign, and search engine to search engine. The notion of strictly engineering the site to control your users and their behaviour is akin to trying to catch the wind.

On a business site, the most overlooked exercise is to determining what the audience wants from the website and compare it to what the website actually offers. What you should expect is a handful of common use-cases which illustrate the behaviour of the target audience and how they truly interact with the website.

If your client’s website offers only one service or product, then the primary audience will likely follow one common path, and Mr. Armstrong’s proposition can ring true; however, if your client’s website offer’s multiple products and solutions to several key audiences, the most effective thing you can do is develop a user-interaction strategy to help users qualify themselves quickly and funnel them to the right place regardless of their entry-point into the website.

E.g. from a user’s perspective: “I am this type of user, and I am looking for this type of content.”

Whatever strategy you take, the execution should remain simple, effectively changing the principle to : “Your site should drive your traffic effectively”.

“Provide performance metrics”

I would consider this an irresponsible statement:

Finally, if you really want to impress business people, put together a little report of how a design performs. It doesn’t have to be fancy — maybe a little spreadsheet (those business types do love Excel) with some basic metrics you can pull off of Google Analytics like visitors, time on site, most popular funnel path, and even a goal conversion rate.

I definitely agree that providing post-launch metrics are an effective means of helping to justify or support certain design decisions on a website, but this needs to be put into serious perspective: a responsible designer Agency/Vendor/Consultant will look first to ensure that the metrics support the design recommendations as it applies to the business goals.

To be clear: look to the business goals of the website FIRST — design decisions when it comes to websites should be considered with an eye towards better usability to support those business goals.

My biggest point of contention with this last guideline is that metrics are interpretive and can easily be used to disguise a poor architecture or site user-interaction strategy.

The value of certain metrics are largely determined by type of website, which in many cases is a reflection of the fundamental difference between a E-commerce website vs. a Lead Generation website. “Traffic Volume” for one site does not equate to “Lead Capture” on another.

Simply providing a spreadsheet and some screen captures is a easy way to obfuscate or skew the meaningful metrics. Be responsible and avoid polluting your client’s metrics without providing a deeper understand of the ‘why’ behind the numbers.

Conclusion

What the last section of Mr. Armstrong’s article should have proposed is:

Much of the time, “business speak” can (and will likely) hamper true conversations and discussions around meeting business goals. I would suggest that rather than effect pretence, speak plainly.

When you are engaged with a client to develop or refresh their website, it is your responsibility to educate yourself and your client about what constitutes good design as it is applied to their project, and ultimately how the goals are quantified.

This is how an agency/vendor/consultant can add true value for a client.

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