Designers Have Different Goals

Having purchased design services dozens of times over the past 10 years, there are some patterns I’d like to discuss briefly.  These patterns come up when purchasing from outside professional service firms as well as utilizing designers within the organization.

Think about a normal situation for a business wanting to update their web site.  The goal is not to have a new website, that is simply the means to an end.  The goal is to improve their business, which for most businesses is measured in terms of more customers, more leads, more sales, more users, or similar measures.

The goals are related to making more money.

So the business owner (or manager) hires a web design firm to “fix” the web site.

Are the goals of the firm aligned with the person who hires them?

No.

And this is one of the trickiest parts of purchasing design services.

Goals of Designers

Designers have different goals than your business. The reason is designers are managing their own business.  Even if the designer works for the firm, they have a career and their future is based on the visual portfolio they can show to future potential customers and employers. On it’s own, this is not highly problematic.

Good design for you should translate into a better portfolio for the designer.  However, most purchasers of programming and design services are unsophisticated and designers have learned this.  Designers have learned to produce designs that make statements, rather than designs that enable great user experience.  Also, due to the short lifetime of designs on the web, designers also know they won’t be able to simply point a future employer or customer at the site in order to experience the great design and user experience – as the site might no longer be online.

Designers are often judged based on their creativity – rightly so – however this systemically pushes design away from doing the same old boring things that work, toward the unique and noteworthy.  As many user experience and usability professionals have pointed out over the past decade, your users spend most of their time on other sites and very little time on your site, so making them learn a new way of doing things just so your site can be “unique” is very problematic.

In total, these issues create motivations for designers to create work that is overly designed and too unique for the majority of design purchasers.

What You Can Do

In my experience, there are three (related) techniques you can use when working with designers.

1. Ask them to explicitly list the design and UX patterns they are utilizing in the design as well as the corresponding research that supports those patterns.  These should be testable ideas, not just opinions about what looks good.  Remember, this isn’t art we’re creating, it is design the helps your users/customers do what you want them to do – sign up, place an order, read more, etc.
2. Have them help you setup A/B testing of several home page designs. (Or designs of whichever part of your site is being redesigned.)  This is one of the processes utilized to determine the best practice design patterns utilized in the above point.
3. Explicitly state your fear of having a design that is more focused on their portfolio rather than your business objectives.  I’m serious here, they need to hear this.

Collectively, these techniques can help you ensure better alignment of your goals and the goals of the designer.  It’s not easy, as can be seen in many of the tragic, over designs on the web.