Why Your Web Designer Is Never Right
Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 10:29PMOne of my most valuable and effective services evolved out of being a web designer: interviewing customers.
In the early days of my web designing career some mumble mumble years ago, I would spend hours coming up with the right combination of color, graphics, photos, lines, gradients and layout to achieve the perfect home page. And it was typically prepared for an executive who led the department that was portioning their budget for my full-time position. I was their web bit**.
"Can you make that picture bigger? I like this blue, but this red is too dark. Can you make it lighter? No, how about green? I like green. Make it green."
This was a regular occurrence for a long time in the corporate world. I tried to gently introduce them to the basics of design principles through my designer street cred, but when I saw the blank stares and slack jaws, I learned to stifle myself. In the end, the website went to green with humongous pictures, and I internalized my frustration with my design-in-a-vacuum situation.
Then usability testing hit the web world (thank you, Jakob Nielsen, for popularizing UT). I heard angels singing. Suddenly, I didn't have to dispute color or layout with the MBAs. The users were judge and jury when it came to website effectiveness. When I started noticing how there was never enough money in the budget for user testing, I understood. It was never about the website's design to begin with.
When I left corporate life and started my own company, things changed. Everything I created, wrote, or designed was driven by one thing: my client's customer and their experience. Suddenly it was about content. Functionality. Usability. How quick they could get in and out and on with their lives. How it solved their problems. How it served their needs. How it made their day. How it made them feel good about doing business with my client.
It had little to do with what my client personally wanted, because my clients get it. Customers are why they are in business. They are why they do what they do, and their reason for being. Granted, customers don't run the show, but they do have a very big voice when it comes to communications and service. It all matters when creating a publishing tool, a servicing tool, a sales tool (and so many other solutions that a website provides) that can hold the key to your business thriving or dying a slow death-by-competition.
So the next time your designer (if they're worth their salt) disputes a subjective decision you're making about their creative work on your site, understand that your designer knows that your website has not an audience of one. It has an audience of potentially thousands, if not more. They are only arguing for your audience, not for their chops as a designer or your subjective observation of their design.
That is, if they've incorporated user feedback into their design. The customer is, after all, always right.
Reader Comments (2)
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