Sep 21 2009
Joshua Porter of Bokardo Design wrote in early August about a conversation he head with a designer working on a home page redesign. More specifically, he asked the designer what metric he hoped to improve with the redesign. The designer's response was “I don’t know which metric. I just want us to not look so crappy”.
As Joshua mentions in his article, wanting to improve on aesthetics is all fine and dandy. But that's a much more difficult thing to measure success on.
Designers aren't the only ones responsible
Now, Joshua is clearly directing his blog post at designers. And with good reason: many, many, many designers design just to make things look pretty or cool or hip. And while that's important, it's borderline fine art rather than design. Aiming to improve a specific outcome, as Joshua writes, is about "becoming more strategic and thus more important to business success".
But designers can't be the only ones held responsible for this. While I do feel that as designers we need to be designing strategically to help our clients' businesses, clients themselves need to be aware of what they need to happen in order for business to improve and grow. I'm not suggesting that clients know something so exact as wanting to "convert X% of users from Y page into paying customers" (though undoubtedly some will). Business owners (clients) should be aware that design changes to their website (or whatever marketing collateral) will have a direct impact on their business, be it brand recognition or lead conversion.
I understand that website layouts become outdated and a refresh of the look alone is generally a good thing. But to simply ignore how design can actually improve your business is ignorant at best. As Joshua notes in his blog post, looking better just won't cut it... especially if you expect to be competitive.