14 Tips for a Web Redesign (HOW Design Conference)
Kelly Goto, of gotomedia.com, spoke on the topic of web redesigns; titled, “Behind the Wheel of Web Redesign: What Drives Success”. Kelly highlighted fourteen tips for designers to keep in mind when approaching web redesigns. Kelly was by far one of the greatest speakers at the 2006 HOW Design Conference – I wanted to ensure everyone who didn’t attend could benefit from her knowledge. Kelly’s tips include:
- Determine your brand value and core service offerings.
What will your company be known for and how will you differentiate yourself in the marketplace? If internal – how will you sell yourself to your peers? You want to offer a solid proposition for your clients or company to translate into revenue. Clear brand positioning is critical for long-term success. - Determine strengths and weaknesses.
Are you a specialist or a generalist? Strive to aid your positioning and service offerings to better allow you to target specific project types and clients. - Have a clear vision.
Have a vision for the type of company you want to be or be in, and the goals you have for revenue, growth and clients/projects. Work towards laying the foundation for establishing predictability in the marketplace. Determining how scalable your business is will allow for proper planning and fewer surprises. - Follow iterative design cycles.
For the most effective focus and strategy, develop quarterly goals and set-up a method for residual income. Planning for success means looking at the long term plan and developing quarterly initiatives to meet the overarching goals. Make yourself indispensable! - Reduce overhead and raise profitability.
Concentrate on balancing passion for design with profitable projects. Designers want to work in a beautiful workspace, and often demand high rates and work they can dig their creative juices into. This does not always equal profitability. - Establish clear project types.
Understand the “ideal” project for your team/company and the baited projects to avoid. Bigger is not always better. Large projects seem “sexy”, however often take more resources and time than expected. Find the sweet spot your team can handle. Break a project down into smaller pieces if necessary. - Track your hours.
Perhaps the most important tip you can use to help your business grow into success. Knowing how time is spent and developing patterns allow for planning and predictability. - Establish workflow.
Find a workflow that works for your team and your project types. Keep it simple and clear for both team and client. Communication and organization will streamline your process and help projects deliver on time and on budget. - Communicate clearly.
Communicate with your team and with the decision makers. Collect survey questions, write a communication brief (as opposed to a creative brief), and set up a central staging area. State goals up front, and help troubleshoot issues along the way and avoid confusion down the road. - Develop a usability and research toolkit. A toolkit is helpful for ongoing feedback and testing cycles. Empowering your team with user-centered research techniques will yield more effective design and development.
- Create audience profiles and usage scenarios.
Conduct ethnographic-based research. Creating personas and real-life scenarios allows you to think ‘in the shoes’ of your target audience and design with them in mind. - Streamline your process.
Use information design intensives to reduce the structure phase. Bringing all of the decision-makers into the process collaboratively saves a lot of time and back-and-forth. - Use brand boards.
Quickly convey themes and put descriptors from the communication brief into visual format. Avoid using rounds of design directions to pacify a group of decision-makers who don’t know what they are doing or what their brand vision is. - Track and measure.
Use stats tools such as Google’s Urchin, or Hitbox to track effectiveness of initiatives. Without tangible information, your efforts are mere ‘shots in the dark’.
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Categories: design
- June 15th, 2006
- 4comments
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well, I’m not going to have any trouble taking design advice from a site that nice.
Hey, I have that book! I heard Kelly speak at FlashForward. Great stuff!
While I don’t doubt the value of Goto’s speech, I think these 14 items are, for the most part, things that people shouldn’t have to be told. Then again, common sense isn’t common.
On the other hand, I like that she identified 14 things you should be doing before the actual work commences. Too many people just jump in and start doing something - anything - without a clear plan (that everyone has bought in to) on where they’re trying to go.
Of course, the follow-up speech would be how to avoid seeing these 14 steps rolled back or overruled as the design moves forward.
I completely agree with you. Kelly gives some strong and valuable tips — most of which should be obvious. However, I do think she makes some assumptions over the amount of “control” most of us designers and creative directors really have.
One of the things Kelly touched on was the fact that these tips will not only apply to our careers but to our side-work as well — by a raise of hands, it was clear the majority of the audience who didn’t own their own firm were actively freelancing on the side.