I've been running into a problem getting feedback for design projects at work. Before writing a post about that, I want to go over what my goals are when designing a website. My next post will explain why it's difficult to measure the effectiveness of a design using these criteria.
In my opinion, there are only two things that really matter when measuring the response to a new website design:
- Initial Impression - Before the visitor actually reads any text or tries to figure out how the site works, they naturally develop some sort of impression. If you have lots of flashing text and bright colors, they'll think that it's busy and unprofessional before reading a single word on the page. If you see mint.com for the first time, you get a clear, refreshed feeling. The first time you see netflix.com you are reminded of fond memories watching movies with your family.
- Action Item - For any given web page, there is some desired user action. When someone goes to twitter.com, they should be clicking the green "Get Started--Join" button. Amazon wants people to buy something. Blogs want people to click on as many links as possible so that the visitor is seeing more advertisements (clicking on ads is nice too).
The initial impression is important because a visitor's opinion of a company is heavily based on gut feeling and there is almost no way to change the positive and negative connotations they develop with a brand. For example, the first time I ever heard of the show Lie-to-me was when Pandora played a 15 second audio ad in between songs. I don't fault Pandora for advertising, but I'd never heard an ad like this before from them. Every time I think of the show, it reminds me of the day Pandora started interrupting my music with annoying audio ads. The show can't do anything to change this negative first impression.
The reason the action item is important should be obvious. Most websites have an agenda and you generally can't fulfill your agenda if every visitor only views your landing page. It doesn't matter if they think, "this is the most attractive website I've ever seen. I really like this brand and the products the sell look great! I want to buy!" If they leave the site after saying that, you failed in your design.
There are other things that sort of matter, but these two items are all I am really focused on getting right with a new design.
When I'm working on a site, I figure out what the first impression should be. With work websites, I generally want a "this company seems professional, but still fairly modern and young in the way they think" reaction. With
cbBlitz.com , I want to set the site apart from other fantasy football options by being very simple (i.e. not part of a major media company) and looking trendy and slick enough that people will assume I'm technically competent just based on the design.
Then I figure out exactly what the ideal user action would be. On cbBlitz, clicking "Create Account" is clearly the goal. If you go to the
home page of this site, I'm obviously trying to get you to click on one of the four images (blog, portfolio, bio, resume). The main one I want you to see is the blog so I put it first and gave it the color that best complements the blue used in the logo and background. Portfolio is second most important (even though I don't have anything built yet). Resume is next in terms of importance but I put it last because people often skim through content and end up reading the very end more than the stuff in the middle.
If you get the initial impression and the action item right on each page you design, you're doing a good job. The same types of things hold true with other design such as business cards, brochures and html emails.
In the next post, I'm going to explain why I have a lot of trouble actually measuring the effectiveness of my designs based on these two goals. Stay tuned.
