In this chapter we will outline:
- How to choose a successful design that will best serve your customer needs
- The importance of successfully communicating your brand
- The value of testing your website design as early as possible
If you have properly defined your site and communicated decisions throughout the business, any resulting design prototypes should not throw up any surprises.
Designers will probably provide you with around three proposed graphical designs. Allow time for debate and discussion, and time for the design company to make any final tweaks.
Conflicts may involve something as minor as a disagreement over the colour scheme. We’ve mentioned how your web designer should be familiar with your company’s corporate identity before work begins, so this should help guide the look and feel of the new site, thus avoiding such conflicts.
In order to keep things on track and on budget, it is of the utmost importance to agree the scope of the project very early on.
‘Once people start to see the proposed designs, they tend to get very excited. There’s a temptation to think about other types of functionality we could introduce at that stage. It’s important to constantly assess where you are against what you initially agreed would be the scope of the project. We could phase the functionality in at a later stage, or go back to the objectives and say: ‘Yes, this does look cool and other people are doing it, but it’s not what we’re trying to achieve at this stage.’’
When considering which design to go for, ask yourself which one speaks to your customer, not to you. Does it have the right connection?
‘My wife was trying to book a holiday in Greece and we had a choice of three different hotels. We visited each of their sites and made our choice on an emotional decision based on the clean and crisp design of the site and how the imagery used was all about the type of experience you’d have at the hotel. They’d thought about what they wanted to communicate to the world through their main shop window; the web. It wasn’t a transaction site where we could book online – but my wife was encouraged to pick up the phone and call Greece to make the booking.’
Larger companies in particular will have specific brand guidelines that the web design company will need to incorporate, explains Mark Bennett of BlackOrange. ‘These dictate style, such as which colours and fonts should be used, and how and where the logo can be positioned.’
Laura Crofton-Atkins of web agency Fortune Cookie says it will obtain signed and approved brand guidelines from the client before it begins putting any design concepts together. Usually, it’ll be applying an offline brand online or refreshing a current brand to a more modern feel, rather than working on branding work.
Case study
Find out how the world’s oldest brush maker, Kent Brushes, refreshed its brand image and relaunched its website in one fell swoop in our
case study.
Often, businesses that commission a web design agency are already in the process of developing or redeveloping their branding anyway, and are therefore working quite closely with another brand agency at the same time.
Take, for example, one of Fortune Cookie’s clients, The Atlantic Hotel. This top small luxury hotel in the Channel Islands decided to update its brand identity at the same time as its site relaunch.
Its Jersey-based advertising agency was asked to produce a set of brand identity guidelines, detailing how new logos and corporate colours should appear. ‘The most important part of this process was the commissioning of new photography and a digital image library,’ says managing director Patrick Burke.
In particular, small businesses will often need to start developing their brand from scratch, including designing a logo. A web designer can often help you with this.
‘Sometimes it’s quite a big thing for business to ‘step up’, even if they’re just employing a freelancer for the first time, rather than doing it in-house or getting their mate’s brother to do it. But when they invest a bit more money in it they’re normally quite pleased with the results.’
Never underestimate the value of testing ideas, structures and designs on your users as early as possible. This is one of the best ways to find out what is and isn’t working; it will help to keep the project on track and could save you money in the long run.
Low-fi testing
Preliminary sketches of potential designs can be unleashed on users before a final decision is made, if there is the time and budget for it.
Then, once the design has been decided, some extra testing of a working prototype can serve as a validation exercise.
‘Maybe we’ve sketched up pictures of what the website will look like and we’ll ask people to use their finger as a mouse and point on what they might click. The reason you’d do that is because it’s easy to change a sketch. If you designed a website, did a template and put it up and running as a website and people said ‘oh, it would be better if that element was there,’ it would be difficult to change at that point.’’
Eye-tracking testing
Very early on in the process, some larger agencies will test their designs by following where the users’ eyes lead on the page. In essence, their eye movements will help dictate the design.
‘Eye-tracking is really great for evaluating the effectiveness of the design. Just say you have a really important call to action on the homepage, and your business goal is that everyone sees this call to action. So, you would do eye-tracking on the designs to see where people look in the first five seconds.’
Fortune Cookie will test designs with people from a range of age groups, gender and level of internet usage. But occasionally their users will be very specific, depending on the project. As Laura Crofton-Atkins points out, it is vital to do this kind of testing as early as possible; the later you leave it, the more expensive it is to make amends.
It goes without saying that what your visitors read is just as important as the graphic design of a website.
Reading from a screen is often considered less effective than reading from paper, but there are steps you can take to make your content as legible and understandable as possible. Short paragraphs work better than dense bodies of text, and you don’t want to bore your visitors with jargon or long-winded explanations. In short, the site should communicate quickly and effectively in plain English.
There are also search engine considerations. If you want your website to appear high up in Google search results, your content will need to be optimised; and you will need the right expertise on board to help you achieve this.
It’s useful if you can have as much working content ready as possible for the designers to work with.
If you are going to be adopting a content management system on your website, now is the time to organise training sessions. These can be technical as well as editorial: you want people to be able to positively reflect your corporate identity through the right tone of voice.
So, you’ve decided on the design, and now it’ll get developed and turned into a proper, live website, as defined in the requirements. Everything should be plain sailing, right? Not necessarily. In reality, of course, things can go wrong.
A good way to reduce the likelihood of any nasty surprises is to keep the user personas developed during the research stage close to hand. Whether it’s an individual programmer or a team of 20, your development team should be aware of the personas so they can refer back to them during the design process.
‘Sometimes you come up with wireframes, and even a working prototype, and unfortunately it goes into development and comes out looking completely different and unviable for your customer base. Make sure the personas developed at the beginning are being used to guide the design process.’