{"rowid": 158, "title": "10 Ways To Get Design Approval", "contents": "One of the most challenging parts of the web design process is getting design sign off. It can prove time consuming, demoralizing and if you are not careful can lead to a dissatisfied client. What is more you can end up with a design that you are ashamed to include in your portfolio.\n\nHow then can you ensure that the design you produce is the one that gets built? How can you get the client to sign off on your design? Below are 10 tips learnt from years of bitter experience.\n\n1. Define the role of the client and designer\n\nMany of the clients you work with will not have been involved in a web project before. Even if they have they may have worked in a very different way to what you would expect. Take the time at the beginning of the project to explain their role in the design of the site.\n\nThe best approach is to emphasis that their job is to focus on the needs of their users and business. They should concentrate on the broad issues, while you worry about the details of layout, typography and colour scheme.\n\nBy clarifying what you expect from the client, you help them to provide the right kind of input throughout the process.\n\n2. Understand the business\n\nBefore you open up Photoshop or put pen to paper, take the time to make sure you properly understand not only the brief but the organization behind the site. By understanding their business objectives, organizational structure and marketing strategy your design decisions will be better informed.\n\nYou cannot rely upon the brief to provide all of the information you need. It is important to dig deeper and get as good an understanding of their business as possible. This information will prove invaluable when justifying your design decisions.\n\n3. Understand the users\n\nWe all like to think of ourselves as user centric designers, but exactly how much effort do you put into knowing your users before beginning the design process?\n\nTake the time to really understand them the best you can. Try to meet with some real prospective users and get to know their needs. Failing that work with the client to produce user personas to help picture exactly what kind of people they are. \n\nUnderstanding your users not only improves the quality of your work, but also helps move the discussion away from the personal preferences of the client, to the people who\u2019s opinion really matters.\n\n4. Avoid multiple concepts\n\nMany clients like the idea of having the option to choose between multiple design concepts. However, although on the surface this might appear to be a good idea it can ultimately be counterproductive for design sign off.\n\nIn a world of limited budgets it is unwise to waste money on producing designs that are ultimately going to be thrown away. The resources would be better spent refining a single design through multiple iterations.\n\nWhat is more, multiple concepts often cause confusion rather than clarity. It is common for a client to request one element from one design and another from the second. As any designer knows this seldom works.\n\n5. Use mood boards\n\nClients are often better at expressing what they don\u2019t like than what they do. This is one of the reasons why they favour producing multiple design concepts. An alternative less costly approach is to create a series of mood boards. These boards contain a collection of colours, typography and imagery which represent different \u201cmoods\u201d or directions, which the design could take. \n\nMood boards are quick and easy to produce allowing you to try out various design approaches with the client without investing the time needed to produce complete design concepts. This means that by the time you develop a concept the client and designer have already established an understanding about the direction of the design.\n\n6. Say what you like\n\nIt is not uncommon for a client to ask for a design that looks similar to another site they like. The problem is that it can often be hard to establish exactly what it is about the site that attracts them. Also in many cases the sites they like are not something you are keen to emulate!\n\nA better approach that was suggested to me by Andy Budd is to show them sites that you think the design should emulate. Keep a collection of screen captures from well designed sites and pick out a few that are relevant to that particular client. Explain why you feel these designs might suit their project and ask for their feedback. If they don\u2019t like your choices then expose them to more of your collection and see what they pick out.\n\n7. Wireframe the homepage\n\nOften clients find it hard to distinguish between design and content and so sometimes reject a design on the basis that the content is not right. This is particularly true when signing off the homepage.\n\nYou may therefore find it useful to establish the homepage content before producing the design. That way once they see the design they will not be distracted by the content. One of the best ways to do this is by producing a basic wireframe consisting of a series of content boxes. Once this has been approved you will find the sign off of design much easier.\n\n8. Present your designs\n\nAlthough it is true that a good design should speak for itself it still needs presenting to the client. The client needs to understand why you have made the design decisions you have, otherwise they will judge the design purely on personal preference. \n\nTalk them through the design explaining how it meets the needs of their users and business objectives. Refer to the mood boards and preferred sites the client approved and explain how the design is a continuation of those. Never simply email the design through and hope the client interprets your work correctly!\n\n9. Provide written supporting material\n\nUnfortunately, no matter how well you justify the design to the client he is almost certain to want to show it to others. He may need his bosses approval or require internal buy in. At the very least he is going to want to get a second opinion from a friend or colleague.\n\nThe problem with this is that you are not going to be there to present to these people in the same way you did for the client. You cannot expect the client to present your ideas as well as you did. The reality is that you have lost control of how the design is perceived.\n\nOne way to minimize this problem is to provide written documentation supporting the design. This can be a summary of the presentation you gave to the client and allows him to distribute this along with the design. By putting a written explanation with the design you ensure that everybody who sees it gets the same message.\n\n10. Control the feedback\n\nMy final piece of advice for managing design sign off is to control the way you receive feedback. A clients natural inclination will be to give you his personal opinion on the design. This is reinforced because you ask them what they think of the design. Instead ask them what their users will think of the design. Encourage them to think from the users perspective.\n\nAlso encourage them to keep that overarching focus I talked about in my first tip. Their tendency will be to try to improve the design, however that should be your problem not theirs. The role of a client should be to defend the needs of their users and business not do the design. Encourage the client to make comments such as \u201cI am not sure that my female users will like the masculine colours\u201d rather than \u201ccan we make the whole design pink.\u201d It is down to them to identify the problems and for you as the designer to find the most appropriate solution.\n\nSo there you have it. My 10 tips to improve design sign off. Will this ensure design approval every time? Unfortunately not. However it should certainly help smooth the way.", "year": "2007", "author": "Paul Boag", "author_slug": "paulboag", "published": "2007-12-10T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2007/10-ways-to-get-design-approval/", "topic": "business"}
{"rowid": 176, "title": "What makes a website successful? It might not be what you expect!", "contents": "What makes some sites succeed and others fail? Put another way, when you are asked to redesign an existing website, what problems are you looking out for and where do you concentrate your efforts?\n\nI would argue that as web designers we spend too much time looking at the wrong kind of problem.\n\nI recently ran a free open door consultancy clinic to celebrate the launch of my new book (yes I know, two shameless plugs in one sentence). This involved various website owners volunteering their sites for review. Both myself and the audience then provided feedback.\n\nWhat quickly became apparent is that the feedback being given by the audience was biased towards design and development.\n\nAlthough their comments were excellent it focused almost exclusively on the quality of code, site aesthetics and usability. To address these issues in isolation is similar to treating symptoms and ignoring the underlying illness.\n\nCure the illness not the symptoms\n\nPoor design, bad usability and terribly written code are symptoms of bigger problems. Often when we endeavour to address these symptoms, we meet resistance from our clients and become frustrated. This is because our clients are still struggling with fundamental concepts we take for granted.\n\nBefore we can address issues of aesthetics, usability and code, we need to tackle business objectives, calls to action and user tasks. Without dealing with these fundamental principles our clients\u2019 website will fail.\n\nLet me address each in turn:\n\nUnderstand the business objectives\n\nDo you ask your clients why they have a website? It feels like an obvious question. However, it is surprising how many clients do not have an answer.\n\nWithout having a clear idea of the site\u02bcs business objectives, the client has no way to know whether it is succeeding. This means they have no justification for further investment and that leads to quibbling over every penny.\n\nHowever most importantly, without clearly defined business aims they have no standard against which to base their decisions. Everything becomes subjective and that will inevitably lead to problems.\n\nBefore we start discussing design, usability and development, we need to focus our clients on establishing concrete business objectives. This will provide a framework for decision making during the development phase.\n\nThis will not only help the client make decisions, it will also focus them on the business and away from micro managing the design.\n\nEstablish clear calls to action\n\nOnce business objectives have been set this opens up the possibility to establish clear calls to action.\n\nI am amazed at how few website owners can name their calls to action. However, I am even more staggered at how few web designers ask about them.\n\nCalls to action are not just limited to ecommerce sites. Whether you are asking people to sign up for a newsletter or complete a contact us form, every site should have a desired objective for users.\n\nWhat is more, each page of a site should have micro calls to action that always draw users on and never leave them at a dead end.\n\nWithout clearly defined calls to action you cannot successfully design a site, structure the user experience or measure its success. They bring focus to the site and encourage the client to concentrate their efforts on helping people reach those goals.\n\nOf course in order to know if a call to action is going to work, it is necessary to do some user testing.\n\nTest against the right tasks\n\nAs web designers we all like to boast about being \u02bbuser centric\u02bc whatever that means! However, in reality I think many of us are paying lip service to the subject.\n\nSure, we ask our clients about who their users are and maybe even do some usability testing. However, usability testing is no good if we are not asking the right questions.\n\nAgain we find ourselves working on a superficial level rather than tackling the deeper issues.\n\nClients find it relatively easy to tell you who their target audience is. Admittedly the list they come back with is often overly long and contains a lot of edge cases. However, where they begin to struggle is articulating what these users will want to achieve on the website. They know who they want to reach. However, they cannot always tell you why those people would be interested in the site.\n\nThese user tasks are another fundamental building block for any successful website. Although it is important for a website owner to understand what their objectives are and what they want users to do, it is even more important that they understand the users objectives as well.\n\nAgain, this provides context for the decisions they are making about design, usability and functionality. Without it the site will become self serving, largely ignoring the needs of users.\n\nUser tasks help to focus the client\u02bcs mind on the needs of their user, rather than what they can get out of them.\n\nSo am I claiming that design, usability and code do not matter? Well the shocking truth is that to some extent I am!\n\nThe shocking truth\n\nWhether we like it or not there is significant evidence that you can create a successful website with bad design, terrible code and without ever running a usability test session.\n\nYou only need to look at the design of Craigslist or the code of Amazon to see that this is true.\n\nHowever, I do not believe it is possible to build a successful website without business objectives, calls to action and a clear idea of user tasks.\n\nDo not misunderstand me. I do believe design, usability and code matters. I just believe that they only matter if the fundamentals are already in place. These things improve a solid foundation but are no use in their own right.\n\nAs web designers it is our responsibility to ensure fundamental questions are being asked, before we start exploring other issues. If we do not, our websites will look great, be well coded and have gone through endless usability tests, however it will not be truly successful.", "year": "2009", "author": "Paul Boag", "author_slug": "paulboag", "published": "2009-12-04T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2009/what-makes-a-website-successful/", "topic": "business"}