Chapter II: Why Are We Here?
This article is an excerpt from "Save the Pixel" (1st edition), available as a PDF ebook.
Know your goal
Knowing your purpose is the most important step in any process. It applies to everything you do as a designer. Before you start anything, it's vital to know where you're going, so you know what direction to set off in, and when to stop.
Before embarking on any project, it pays to get totally 100% clear on what you aim to achieve – your goal. What will it be like once it’s finished? What will be different? How will you feel?
A state of being
Remember, a goal is a state of being, not a state of doing. It isn’t something you do, it’s somewhere you arrive. So “designing a cool web site” isn’t a goal. Lots of talented designers have that purpose and never stop redesigning their sites, because they simply get what they ask for, “doing”.
A true goal is the place you’ll be once you’ve achieved what you’re doing. Just visualising your end point is a kind of magic that helps your mind automatically and invisibly rewire itself to figure out the path ahead, and the next steps.
If you’re involved in web site projects right now, for each try to picture what it will feel like to present it to the client or your boss, or to unveil it to the public. What exact words do people say? Why does the site work for them? What are people doing in response to the site? What feedback do you receive? How does that feel?
This will help you know where you’re going. With your goal clear in your mind, what’s the first step? You should find it comes quite easily.
Goals for web sites
A web site is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
People don’t visit the iTunes site for the fun of browsing the site. They do it to get music at a fair price, so that they can enjoy listening to the music. Browsing is not the goal. The goal is what comes later - the enjoyment of the music. The website is just a means to get visitors to that point.
When I log on to my online bank account, my goal isn’t “to manage my finances”. I don’t enjoy managing my finances. I enjoy popping open a bottle of wine in the knowledge my finances are in order. My goal is “to know that my finances are in order”. The online banking website’s job is to transport me to that knowledge and that bottle of wine as smoothly and quickly as possible!
Once you're clear on what your purpose here is, but before you start actually making design decisions, get clear on the purpose and objectives of the web site. I find it works to express these in terms of goals as well.
Of course, the goals behind web sites vary enormously. This isn't the place to try to address every possible business strategy, but some general guidelines may be helpful.
Good goals should be:
- Simple
- Realistic
- Specific
Simple
Firstly, try to reduce and simplify goals, seeking to recognise the core intention, motivation, or foundations that underlie a tactical goal. A good trick can simply be to ask “Why?” or “How?” enough times until you get to an immutable core intent.
“We want a really cool web site”
Why?
“We want more people to find out about our products and buy from us”
Why?
“We want to sell more widgets to more companies.”
How?
“By becoming known as the most affordable brand of quality widgets.”
Having a cool web site could be a valid goal, but if there are deeper motives behind it, they'll be more useful to bear in mind as you make decisions about the web site.
If one result follows from another, look into the original achievements for specific and simple components that more directly apply to the task at hand.
For example, a web site's financial goal might be reached as a result of increased numbers of visitors combined with an improvement in conversion rate.
While the financial result is certainly important, profit or turnover could come about through other means, so it may not be as useful a goal as focusing on visitor numbers & conversion rate.
Realistic
A goal only works for you if you can believe in it and keep the vision in mind. If a goal is too ambitious, or doesn't truly reflect business intent, it can't really motivate.
It's better to choose modest goals and practice achieving them, than to be too ambitious and practice failure.
Specific
The market rewards leaders, and you can't be the best at 2 things. Most markets today are big and offer lots of choice. People tend to gravitate towards the most highly-recommended provider in any field.
Secondly, people also tend to need something specific, not something generic. While they may put a general term into a search engine, e.g. “Web designer Quebec”, what they actually need is someone who's in their right price bracket, who does the right kind of work.
Plus it's more realistic and achievable to be the best at something specific than something general.
For example, it's more realistic to aim to be the best at creating accessible Frenchlanguage web sites for public service organisations in Canada than it is to be the most sought-after web designer in Canada.
What you want to achieve on a web site can be quite general. “We want more people to be using the site to share their business information”, for example. That's fine as a “want”, but it isn't a goal. Attaching specific success criteria to your goals help focus the mind and intent much more.
Let's take the criterion, “500 new businesses per month are signing up on our site, and adding at least one location.” That's much more useful, because it helps you:
- Measure how well you're doing (how on track you are for success)
- Visualise what needs to happen in order to increase your success rate
If you're only getting 100 new businesses to this point in a month, you know you're only 20% on track. You can also set milestones in your process (Google Analytics is a great way to help you do this), and measure how many people are getting to each point. You may spot sticking points in your stats, where more people are dropping out than you'd expect, which can help focus your analysis.
“More people are using the site...” wouldn't give you these benefits. By that measure, having an extra 3 visitors per month would constitute success, but would it mean success for the business?
Get the Full Book!
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What You'll Get
11 chapters, 22 complete web page redesigns, in 108 pages crammed with professional web design secrets & tips!
About Ben Hunt
Ben Hunt is lead designer and consultant at web design agency Scratchmedia.
He has created hundreds of web designs for companies, government and charities.
Ben's free tutorials on web design have been ready by millions of readers.
He is acknowledged as a thought leader in effective web design techniques.
His second book “Web Site Optimization from Scratch” will be published by Wiley & Sons in late 2010.
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Benjamin PngWeb Design from Scratch has been on my bookmarks for the longest time now, as I was taken aback when I first chanced upon it. It presented web design in such a structured, educational but yet enlightening way that I could not help but continue to be drawn to its contents. It helped shape the way I design my sites, even though web design is just a hobby of mine. So when Ben released "Save the Pixel", it was almost a given that I would purchase it.
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For anyone who still cares about quality design and clean, intuitive user interfaces for modern web designs, Ben Hunt is your man.ZenTwist