So you need a teapot
You hear on the news that a new gourmet tea shop has opened. Your mother-in-law loves tea and is coming for a visit. Your rush out to purchase this highly coveted tea but realize you don’t have a teapot. It doesn’t need to be a fancy teapot; just an ordinary, every day teapot. The color and material are not all that important. But you need a teapot and you need it now.
You run into the closest store, ignore the recommendations of the trained salesperson, and pick up a teapot from the clearance rack. After rushing home you add the tea to the pot, pour in the boiling water and wait 3 minutes. You present the tea along with delicious cookies to your mother-in-law and wait for the accolades.
Based on the picture above it seems rather unlikely that you will receive much in the way of accolades, don’t you think?
I want it now!
As an indy web team that develops sites for small businesses and ministries, we are often faced with the challenge of explaining the importance of sound design and usability. A high percentage of our clients are less than tech-savvy. They do not understand geek-speak. They don’t understand what goes into designing a website. They just know they want a website.
To say that designing for small business clients is a completely different experience from designing for medium to large businesses and government is an understatement. Large organizations have IT, Marketing and Brand Departments. Large organizations tend to have a better understanding of trends, colors, design, web standards and usability. Large organizations are also more understanding of process and shared responsibility for the success of the final product.
Designing for small business often requires us to educate our clients and to communicate in a different way. When discussing usability with a former client I was told: “Don’t worry about all that. Just make it look good.” Unfortunately it’s not quite that simple. It has to look good and work right. And often the “just make it pretty” folks can tell you exactly what they don’t like AFTER you have already delivered what you thought was the completed site.
But I like the marching ants!
We have encountered clients who really like animated cursors or auto-playing videos or music. Steering them clear of these things can be a challenge. They genuinely like those things and believe it will make their site better. Do not make usability and basic design standards the sacrificial lambs of your work.
In order to gain buy-in and trust, we use best-in-class examples for organization of information, navigation and design. We walk through sites the client likes – some in the same business, some not – and ask what they like and do not like about those sites. We talk about good web site experiences and bad ones, gathering information, but also, gently nudging the clients towards attractive AND usuable designs.
James focuses on design elements. He engages and leads the client through the conversations regarding layout, content and branding. I work to understand the business, the business owners and their customers. I gather information about the elements of the business – their products and services, the feeling you get when you walk in the door or when you speak to the owner or someone who works there – to give me an idea of how we should approach the design. I also look at the strength of the brand – if there is a clear brand involved – and how we support that and even build on it.
We use all the information gathered to create the conceptual designs we present to our clients. The visual representations of those discussions are the most valuable pieces of work product we produce outside of the delivered site. Working without those mock-ups would handicap us and increase the likelihood of rework down the road.
Now, about that teapot
The unusable teapot is what we get when we fail to engage our clients in a way that gives them the website they truly need. In working with small business clients we have found that they often want a website but haven’t given it much more thought than that. Our conversations elicit the responses that allow us to connect the want with the need and avoid the little red teapot above.
Such a perfect analogy of why we need to explain our design process/decisions to our clients. Well done!
Good article. I run into some of these same problems myself. I like the suggestion of walking the client through the competitors website to help them understand what works and what doesn’t. It can be very difficult to steer them away from no-no’s like music or other gimmicks but you have some good suggestions on that. Thanks.