Today I was reading a post by Ryan on 37signals’ blog Signal vs. Noise called The Documentation Dilemma. Ryan proposes that the act of documentation and creation of project artifacts is a symptom of a bottleneck in the value chain. He implies the documentation process can slow down the creative process to the point where you either:

1. Produce design ideas at the pace of development or

2. Freeze ideas in the form of documents, diagrams and requirements until they are ready to go later on in the process.

I think this is an oversimplification of documentation, and when, where and why it’s important to a project. I live in the land of client services, where every project involves a new set of stakeholders, participants, audience types and overall business objectives. Ryan’s team is developing one set of products, used the same way by every customer. There is little customization or need for bureaucratic buy-in as they are their own client, and the strategy may already exist and be a given. However, I see 37signals’ thoughts and propositions on workflow often espoused by design agencies and firms working with client services, and unfortunately I don’t think they overlap well. While we can all appreciate an expedited process and it’s the very reason why we hold the annual X-Day at Fastspot, it is not a system that can support long-term complex client projects.

This tendency towards assuming documentation is a waste of time or as Ryan puts it, “I used to think design teams made so many diagrams and documents because… well, they like that sort of thing.” greatly devalues the importance of clarifying important issues and goals in writing. It is immature to say that some people just like that sort of thing, when in reality, unless you an extremely detail oriented control freak who is trained or gifted as a writer, you probably dread the notion of having to create detailed and important documentation when you’d rather be coding or designing. No, documentation is not something people just do because they like to do it, it is actually important. However, documents and their usefulness should always be held up to scrutiny and improvements should be made whenever possible. Just as the design process should seek to create something perfect and useful for the client, so should the documentation. Documentation can be the first set of deliverables within an agency process to become outdated, stale, or redundant – mainly because they are dismissed as unimportant or left to a lackluster team to plod through begrudgingly. This doesn’t need to be the case if we throw out what we think documentation means and seek to find more meaningful ways to integrate the process of documentation.

I find myself interviewing designers and developers these days and spending as much time looking at their writing skills as I do their technical and design skills. I place a tremendous amount of value on someone’s appreciation for and ability to conduct strategic thinking. We live in an age where a knee jerk reaction is to “just do it”, or find the “app for that” problem. However, you can’t replace good old fashioned brain storming, and the results of that kind of thinking must be successfully documented. Documents can be exciting, inspiring and creative forms of expression. Documents can be “living” data, intended to be evolving road maps which can empower a client team long after the vendor has left and the project deliverables have been handed over. Documents are often the foundations that survive the longest and inform the next iteration of the thinking. They are building blocks that should inform the future, not create problems or bottlenecks for the present.

Some of the most important documentation we create for clients is where we restate recommendations or strategic goals. While one may argue that this is a rehashing of a productive group conversation, what many who are not as familiar with management roles may forget is that important people who have some say in the progression of the project may not have been part of these group collaborative conversations. Often, teams must move strategic goals and recommendations up the pipeline for approval, sign-off, and budget allocations. These stakeholders often don’t have time to sit through the nitty gritty of the conversions and brain storming exercises, but they do need to see the final documentation. This paper trail will also serve as reminders to new members of the team who come on board mid-project and need to catch up. It’s a reality that teams will shift and the last thing you want to have to do is backtrack because a new VP of communications is hired. Documentation, when done successfully, can keep forward momentum in place and keep the team focused.

Additionally, documentation creates trust. We’ve all sat through great meetings only to see good ideas forgotten, see tasks fall to the wayside, and get stuck in those frustrating loops of “well…we talked about this, so I assumed it was going to happen.” Documentation sets expectations, provides clarity, and creates safety nets. It prevents outliers from coming in and playing “dumb” and derailing a project. It prevents clients from bullying vendors with the old “we talked about this” game. It prevents vendors from talking a great game but playing “dumb” when it comes to the deliverables. It provides a sense of accountability, and it gives teams something to cross check against.

One of our documents is the Creative Brief. One part of this document is a list of keywords describing the tone and style of the design. This document is formed after meetings and is based on collaborative discussions and fact finding sessions and research. The list of keywords is short and to the point. However, this list is often referenced during the course of the project by the designers, the developers and the client. If one of the keywords is “friendly”, we have documentation (approved and signed off on by the client) which empowers us to make certain decisions and have them backed up. It prevents an outlier from coming in mid-project and saying “this should be more slick looking”, or “why are all these colorful icons included?” The documentation sets things in stone. It reminds, reinforces, clarifies and limits the scope of the project. Without documentation, we often find ourselves in never-ending circles. Even the mere act of writing something down gives it more legitimacy.

We know that writing is a helpful tool for memory, we have learned that lists help keep us organized, we have even seen studies that suggest the act of writing something down ensures it has a higher likelihood of succeeding. Many of us were told by parents to write down our pros and cons lists before making big decisions. We often can’t see something clearly until it is clearly written out before us. Perhaps the problem with documentation is the tendency towards wasted words and ineffective thinking? I suspect the issue is not with documentation, but with the types of documents being created for the purposes set in place. I also just have to say I find it ironic that someone at 37signals is talking about documentation being a waste of time when their most popular product, Basecamp (which we use and very much like), is essentially an application for better organizing and sharing documentation.

Ryan from 37signals ends his post stating,”Documentation may be necessary when your throughput is low, and that’s an opportunity to see documents not as charming deliverables but as warning signs of a deeper problem in your process.” I would argue that a lack of documentation which is focused on strategic thinking and establishing foundations should be a warning sign of a deeper problem in your process. At Fastspot our “throughput” is anything but low, and our productivity is accomplished with a small team who pride themselves on efficiency. Yet no one here would argue on the pointlessness of our documentation. Sure, documentation might have gotten a bad rap from all the poorly conceived ones that exist in the world, but that doesn’t mean the process of documentation is faulty. When documentation is a recording of a strategic and creative process focused on clearly outlining issues, goals, recommendations and guidelines, and created in a way that empowers collaboration and revisions in the future, it is one of the most important phases of any project.

What do you think? Have you seen documentation derail productivity or the creative process? Do you have a unique process for generating useful documentation? How do you keep clients with bad habits from forcing you to spend time on worthless documentation and instead generate productive documentation? We’d love to hear from you.

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When the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore Maryland approached Fastspot to help solve one of its core challenges, allowing online visitors to browse its collection of works, we jumped at the opportunity. Here is a recap of some of the hurdles, surprises, successes, and failures that we encountered during the course of the project, with insights from Curt Kotula, Art & Technology Director and the lead designer on this project, and Ben Plum, Interactive Designer & Producer and the lead developer on this project.

UX Challenges
The Walters Art Museum has a huge online collection containing thousands of images. Just like the artwork featured in the images, you can’t count on a consistent image aspect ratio. Images range from the absurdly wide to the ridiculously tall, creating a huge layout challenge for us. You also can’t just crop a work of art—it’s impossible to set a standard size, and one solution will not work for all situations.

We attacked this problem on two fronts. First, when browsing, the artwork thumbnails are organized into columns instead of rows, allowing the variety of image sizes to cascade down the page without wasting space. Second, the artwork detail page is organized in such a way that the supporting content flexes and shifts to fit the aspect ratio of the image; wide images span the width of the page with content below, while tall images fill the left side with content to the right. Our goal was to let these beautiful images be the focus no matter what shape the artwork happens to be.

Browse Simple, Make it Stick
The best part about visiting a museum is stumbling upon a piece of art that sticks with you long after you leave. We felt that browsing the Walters’ online collection should also provide that experience. When the project started, there were over 7,000 items in the collection (currently there are over 11,000!). Increasing users’ access to this impressive body of work and overall “browsability” are two of the main objectives for the project.

We engineered several distinct browsing experiences to promote discovery and surprise. Users can browse by category, material, date range, location in the museum, creator, place of origin, tags, and popularity in the community. We engineered browsing options for a variety of audiences, and these options are presented in a simple and direct tabbed interface.

How Many Clicks Does it Take?
Have we mentioned how big the Walters online collection is? Paged results are a necessity when dealing with thumbnail images. Too many images would cripple older computers or take too long to load over a slow Internet connection. Too many pages make larger result sets a bear to navigate.

We asked ourselves: How do you navigate seventy pages of image based results with the same ease and control that you navigate three? How do you conveniently navigate a thousand individual works of art? We decided to throw out the traditional design pattern of numbered pagination (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 … 450), instead opting for a custom solution based on the ease of drag-and-drop. We engineered the pagination system to give the user fine-grain control; the user can step through smaller result sets with the “next” and “previous” buttons, while large result sets can be quickly navigated by simply dragging the handle to an exact page or piece of art. Every result in a particular set is now easily accessible—no more skipping 10 pages at a time just to get to the center of the set.

Community Organizers
Another challenge was that the previous version of the Website offered user curation tools—they are popular with teachers and museum staff but were not well-utilized outside of those audiences. The ability to organize and curate art isn’t just an important tool for educators; it also helps art novices and children alike begin to analyze and appreciate art by making their own connections.

We needed the barrier of entry to be low and the result to be useful and fun. We decided to use Facebook connect rather than managing our own user system, allowing anyone with an active Facebook account to get started quickly and easily. Finally, we branded the curator feature “Community Collections” and brought recent collections to the homepage to promote the feature and encourage sharing.

Programming Challenges
Modern museums have internal database systems for cataloging and archiving collections. The most popular choice for large institutions seems to be the Museum System by Gallery Systems. We don’t doubt that TMS is a fantastic offline collection management system, but simply put, the Web extensions offered are lacking and don’t seem to be a primary focus of the company. Customization options are limited and the default layout is a generic, confusing mess. The result is a hard-to-navigate online collection that isn’t particularly attractive and tends to look a lot like competitors.

Fresh From The Oven
We decided early on to throw out the generic box mix provided by Gallery Systems and work with the Walters database team to create our solution from scratch. We knew right away that we didn’t want to expose the entire TMS database to the Internet nor did we need the massive amount of information it stored. What we did need was a second database that only contained the information necessary for the new online experience. We used our own content management platform, BigTree CMS, as the core technology that drives the site and engineered a scheduled synching process that eliminates double work.

The Fruits of our Labor
Many at Fastspot would argue that this project was one of our most challenging—and most inspiring. We were lucky to have a fantastic team at the Walters to work with, and they gave us a lot of room to flex our UX muscles and explore possibilities. We insisted on keeping things as simple as possible, even as we tried to integrate more complex functionality, so as to always let the artworks remain front and center. More importantly, we re-envisioned what was possible for a museum to offer its online visitors. Through a diligent process of refinement, a willingness to throw away things that weren’t working, and a constant focus on the visitor’s browsing experience, a wonderful new interface and interactive experience emerged.

So far the new Works of Art site has received glowing feedback, and users have jumped right in and started doing what the Walters Art Museum and all of us at Fastspot hoped they would do: delighting in the experience of exploring art.

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Your website’s main navigation, the primary navigation presented to users who first arrive on your website, should do several things, and do them well.

The main nav should be simple. The language, the organization, the placement, the size of the font—everything—should be simple. This is the most useful element of your site, and much like a doorknob or the power switch on an object, it should not be overly complex.

The main nav should tell a story. If you are a college or university, you don’t want to start your nav with “Giving.” You need to tell your story first. Many schools show just how desperate they are by making “Admissions” or “Apply Now” the first link in their main nav. This is bad. Just like a first date, you want to convey confidence and let your user get to know you before you move in for the big smooch.

The main nav should be mature. Nothing screams institutional conflict more than a main nav that is all over the place. A classic example is a nav that is one part general, one part categorical, and one part specific. Main navigation should be consistent in how it groups information; this is to aide users who are learning to use the system as they begin to navigate the site. Placing inappropriate links into your main nav is a quick way to lose user trust and degrade the user experience.

The main nav should start with the largest parts of the funnel. For example, you don’t want your main nav to be all about the specifics. Users will naturally click into sections as they seek more specific information. If they are looking for filet, they will click into the meat tab. If they are seeking lettuce, they will look under vegetables. Give them time and space to find what they are seeking in the natural order of the information.

Your main nav should be short. If you give users too many options, they will have option overload. A main nav that has more than 7 tabs or links is bordering on too big and should set off alarm bells about the overall hierarchy of the information. Remember, your main nav needs to tell a story—so if you overload your visitors with specifics right off the bat, you aren’t letting them read the big picture story.

Your main nav should be useful. It is easy to assume that all things important must go into the main nav. This is a knee-jerk reaction born out of misguided thinking by uneducated information architects or nervous clients. This is simply not the case. The main nav should be the foundation, and it should not have to change down the road. You should not have constantly changing content in your main navigation. There should be other, more visually impactful areas for including these somewhat temporary initiatives within the overall page or site design.

While we may come to think of the main nav as the thing that users see first, this is not true. Users see the features and other more brightly and boldly presented content first. They only move to the main nav when they have shifted from a browsing to a searching mode. The features and other more visual callouts you design for your users are for them to explore and interact with; they let users know what you are saying is important, what is hot, new, happening. They are your breaking news, your highlights, your top stories, your VIPs, your special differentiators. Your main navigation is a set of tools in a toolbox that you want your visitor to understand implicitly and feel confident using to effectively drill down to the specific data they are seeking.

Let’s break down the main navigation in a few sites to explore these positions in more depth.

Example: MailChimp

MailChimp.com Homepage

If you look at MailChimp’s home page and pay attention to where your eye goes, you can see that the most important messages being conveyed are not the main nav, but rather that you can sign up for free, that you can manage email and newsletters easily, and that there are some cool new things happening. Only after scanning these elements do you seek out the main nav, and now your mindset has changed. You are no longer scanning to get a sense of what MailChimp is; you are now going to follow a logical set of pathways to seek out information that is of more specific interest to you. That may be pricing, features, or places to learn more about the community, such as the blog or the support section. But these main nav items are not trying to sell you on the best parts of MailChimp—that is the main page’s job, and the brand, and the marketing messages, and everything else. No, the nav is there to get you where you want to go, now that you know MailChimp is something that interests you.

Example: Southwest Airlines

Southwest Airlines Homepage

In the case of Southwest, there are a ton of things going on, yet the main nav is quite simple—Air, Hotel, Car, Vacations. To the sides, sitting back sightly, we have Special Offers, Travel Guide, and Rapid Rewards. A nifty drop-down menu gives you immediate drill-down options to skip an unnecessary page reload and to quickly let you see what information and functionality resides within each section. Yet, similar to MailChimp, the main nav is doing its thing, and the rest of the site is presenting the hierarchy, directing your attention, making sure you see the special deals and have quick access to certain portals, etc. They don’t try to do it all in the main nav. With such a complex set of user experiences, they have actually presented you with a myriad of navigational “types”—which allow you to “learn” the way to best use Southwest’s site and not be left at the mercy of internal groups playing a turf war over the website’s nav.

Example: Mint

Mint's Homepage

Surely you’ve heard of Mint.com for managing your finances, right? No? Oh—well, if you check out their site you’ll see they suspect you might be a newbie as well, and they will help you get a quick glimpse of what they are about before offering up a helpful main nav geared toward a pleasant introduction process. Here’s what happens when you land on mint.com: You see right away that Mint is the best free way to manage your money, you can get started for free, it’s safe and secure, has bill reminders, gets lots of good press, and works on various devices. Great, you’re in! Now you head to the main nav to learn more. They opt for a two-option main nav: What is Mint? and How it Works. Pretty simple. Of course there are all sorts of other navigational options sprinkled in that you start to see if you haven’t already found what you are looking for, and typically these supplemental navigational elements cater to specific user groups—in Mint’s case, Canadian users, people seeking information about the company, or existing users who want to log in. Most importantly, they assume you don’t know them yet, and they present their offerings in ways that make sense and have a sense of pacing.

Example: Lego

Lego's Homepage

Lego has a fantastic landing page—it invites you right into its online game experience “Lego Universe” while also promoting other featured aspects of the Lego brand, like the Lego Club, My Lego Network, Featured Products, and quick links to highlighted product lines like the Star Wars line, the “Games” line, and the MBA series of toys. Once you are past the initial experience, you are ready to dive into the specifics—and here you have the main nav stepping up and ready to play its role. You have Products, Games, Create & Share, and Shop. Four links. Simple. And a story is being told; you understand that Lego is a brand that is about playing, creating, and sharing as much as it is about selling you small interconnecting plastic blocks. They don’t put LEGO Universe into the main nav, even though one could argue that it seems this is a big push for the company right now. Rather, they feature it in appropriate places. This is also a critical act of restraint because in one or two years, the LEGO Universe may not be the main feature, and it would be wasteful to need to redo the main nav every time a point of emphasis needed to change for an organization.

We try to impart these lessons to our clients at the beginning of every engagement, because much like a house, if the foundation of your main nav is not strong, you risk putting your entire site’s structure and integrity in a compromising position that may need to be readdressed in the near future. And when all else fails, remember that you can rely on your analytics data to truly tell you if your website visitors are going where you want them to go and finding what they want to find. That’s the beauty of the Web—we have data to base our decisions on! Now, this doesn’t mean that the entire process of how we expect to use websites won’t be shifting in the near future, as main navigation gets replaced with interactive elements that involve finger swipes more than the click of a mouse. But visual design, composition, and the inherent ways a person’s eye moves and the way the brain processes information is and has been pretty much the same for the past few thousand years, so don’t mess with evolution and human nature unless you have a pretty convincing argument to do so.

Now go forth and navigate!

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The following post was written by Fastspot’s User Experience Director, April Osmanof, who has single-handedly wrangled in some of our nastiest cases of content hoarding. Here are her thoughts on the content audit / strategy process.

How to Rein in an Expanse of Web Content
A lot of our clients are longstanding, large institutions and associations. By the time their sites make it into our hands for a facelift, there are usually anywhere between 2,000 to 100,000 pages of content. They have already had their sites for years, and most of them have had CMS access to the content from the get go. We all know that not having to rely on a Web team for every update to a site puts a client at a great advantage, but what happens when the content added by the client gets out of control?

A well-functioning CMS can be an empowering tool, but in many cases, abuse of this power comes as no surprise. There are often some sets of instructions on how to add content, but hardly ever any plan for review or removal of unnecessary or outdated content. Building a beautiful site with a user-friendly CMS is a great start for a Web team to deliver, but Websites are living things. They differ from print pieces in that they are never packaged up and never complete; because of this inherent difference, the way the content is dealt with needs to be different. If a Web team just hands off a stylish site with a CMS to a client, especially a large client, the result can be an unruly mess. Plans for the content, along with a well-thought-out governance structure, must be in place from the kickoff in order for good content to be created and maintained. Older sites that have already had a life of their own typically need a lot of cleaning house.

Content, Content Everywhere and Not a Drop to Drink
When one of our larger clients comes to us seeking help with their content strategy, we do a complete content audit of their site. Once a Website goes live and the client gets their hands on the CMS, a collection of excessive and un-focused content can be posted. Pages and information are often added to the site haphazardly, with no one making sure that the content is placed in a logical location within the site’s navigation, that it adheres to the creative goals of the site, and that it is even necessary. When we are assessing sites that have been around for years, we are usually fighting an uphill battle against years of neglected or poorly organized content.

Pages of redundant, inward-facing, uninteresting, overly “markety,” or unnecessary content must be sifted through in order for us to get to the meat of the site. We assess the content, chanting the mantra “the content is for the user” and considering our target audience each step of the way. Whether the purpose of the site is to sell, educate, or entertain users, it cannot be forgotten that they are the reason the site exists and that its content must be pertinent or interesting to them.

Everyone Wants to Feel Important!
Our clients’ team members usually fall into one of two categories: people that are inspired by an-easy-to-use CMS and excited about participating in the content creation for the site, and people that are scared that participating will take up too much of their time or are unsure about what kind of content they should be adding. Empowering staff members to add content and giving them a clear set of guidelines for doing so can lead to a vibrant site that can bring the real social aspect of a community to life on the Web.

People who are desirable candidates for participating in content creation, typically those that are already generating content on their own via blogs or social networking, should know that they are expected or encouraged to generate content. Likewise, they should know where to turn with questions and what the expectations and guidelines are for the types of content they should be adding. One often-fruitful way to get rich content on your site without putting too much pressure on team members is to set up easy-to-update places for media such as photos and videos.

What are the Ingredients for Good Content?
The purpose of a Website is to be clear, easy to read, and interesting to the user; it should always be useful and never overly verbose or filled with useless information. A client cannot allow internal terminology or internal hierarchies to inhibit the users’ ability to understand the content. The Website is not a place to represent any one individual’s agenda. The Website is to be seen with a holistic approach, and one entity, be that an individual or a team, has to be in charge of reining in the content and its creators.

When we are auditing large sites we have to stop and examine each bit of content, asking ourselves at each step:

Is it useful?

Is it public-facing information?

Is the content easily understood?

Is it easy to scan quickly?

Is the content laid out with well-structured HTML?

Does it make use of sub-headlines and lists, allowing the reader to grasp the topics covered at a glance?

Can it be found in a logical place by a user that is searching for it?

Can it be brought to the attention of the user that needs to see it and doesn’t know to search for it?

Is there enough content to warrant a full page?

Is there too much content?

Is it outdated?

Is it redundant?

Is it interesting or necessary? (It must be one or the either, or it should be deleted!)

Are there any gaps in the content?

Content that doesn’t meet our criteria is left on the cutting room floor.

Starting from the Ground Up
Once we have combed through a client’s content, or in the case of clients who are starting fresh, we set up a strategy for who will be in charge and what their goals will be. Obviously these goals are different for each of our clients, but the overall goal is always the same: to keep the user clicking around and reading and to eventually move them to take some sort of action, whether that be applying for admission, getting in touch, donating money, etc.

The team left in charge of the new content from that point forward must keep these content strategies in mind. They can never lose sight of the goals or lose sight of the level of quality the content needs to achieve. Processes for editorial review and consistency review must be instituted, and the governance structure must be planned in such a way that the content workflow does not create bottlenecks. The team must be held accountable for the content and oversee those allowed to add content, ensuring that everyone involved in content creation is informed about the goals of the site and their role as a participant. Keeping an online, easy-to-access reference can greatly aid in ensuring that potential content generators are in the loop.

It is our goal as a Web team to be sure that the site and strategy we provide for our client’s content can grow with them and never limit them. But we also have to be cognizant of the reality of the level and frequency at which our clients are going to be able to generate content.

In the end, creating good Web content is a never-ending balancing act, but with the appropriate tools and systems in place, content creation and maintenance by a team can pay off tremendously, allowing clients to use their content to reinforce their brand and breathe life into their Web presence, instead of the old-school way of relying on a horde of stodgy brochureware.

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When it comes down to it great storytelling wins. Every time. A great story will trump great effects, great technique, great design, great production, anything else. Really good storytelling gets the viewer or reader emotionally invested, and once you have someone emotionally invested, you have them hooked.

Great storytelling should be the goal with everything we create for our clients, to tell their story in a compelling way that allows room for the audience to get invested. A huge component of storytelling is the content, the language being used, the titles of sections, the way phrases are organized, the pacing of the writing. I think this element is often overlooked in the interactive design industry, as we all focus on code and composition and usability and mobile and the list goes on. When do you ever stop and say, let’s discuss the story?

It’s the story that will leave a lasting impression of the brand or the company or the application, not the pieces and parts that house that story. It’s like we focus on the stage set, the costumes, the music the orchestra is playing, the lighting and the effects, the change from scene to scene and the props the actors are using, but no one ever provides a script. We expect our clients to give us this. The script I refer to is copy (and often photography too). This makes little sense. Every project should have a specific process carved out to address the story, or script, or copy. Maybe if we think of it more like a story and less like pages with words on them for Google to index, we will start creating more compelling experiences.

Here are a few examples of companies who tell a great story – and they tell the same great story across all their storytelling vehicles. If you know of some other examples, please leave them in the comments.

Zappos

MailChimp

Jet Blue

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If you have a new idea—a design, an interface, an app, a product—and you start shopping that whatever it is around, pay close attention to people’s reactions. The reason why we sometimes find user testing a necessary and valuable process is because often we have become too familiar with that on which we are working; we can no longer see it from a first-time user’s perspective. You’ve probably experienced something similar when you just kind of let your hair style go a little too long without a cut or color or you put on 10 lbs before you realize it; you don’t see the changes happening because they occur ever so slightly, day by day, until you hopefully realize it and do something about it.

We don’t want to get to the end of a design or production job and realize we were completely off track.

We constantly have people unfamiliar with a project taking a look. We make sure to ask people who aren’t invested in liking it, those who won’t worry about offending if they say, “Ummm—I don’t get it.”

No one likes opening up a process for that potential “I don’t get it” reaction, but it’s absolutely necessary.

An inevitable part of this process goes something like this:

Creative Director or Project Manager: Hey, you, person who has never seen this before, if you were looking to go to college here what would be the first thing you would want to click on?

Person: This is a college Website?

Creative Director or Project Manager: Houston, we have a problem.

Designer: WTF? WTF? Why are you even asking “person”? They don’t know sh*t about design.

Creative Director or Project Manager: Well, person kind of has a point, if you think about it; it kind of does look like a shopping site.

Designer: It only looks like a shopping site to blind idiots.

Creative Director or Project Manager: Let’s ask person #2.

Person #2: I love the shots of the product. Is this a shopping site?

Designer: I hate you.

Creative Director or Project Manager: Okay! It’s only 11 a.m., but we are scheduling a happy hour for lunch. Let’s go!

Three hours later, the designer has calmed down and repaired his or her bruised ego and, realizing this is a battle not to be won by declaring others blind, is now seeing the missteps and figuring out how to change course.

The lesson here? Don’t ignore anyone’s confusion at that with which you are presenting them. You can avoid the situation altogether by learning to trust your own inner voice. It might be hinting at you earlier in the process. ‘Cause chances are, if you’re confused, everyone else is, too.

Disclaimer: If the photo is of your mother or father, or grandmother or grandfather, or any other relative or friend, no offense intended. I came across it on the interwebs here, and quite simply, I was confused.

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Gears of War...or Over Complication

If you want, you can make the simplest task the most complicated waste of time imaginable with almost a guaranteed outcome of non-completion. Now why on earth would we choose to do this? Well, there are a few reasons we tend to do this, and hopefully by identifying them early, you can avoid them and keep it simple. Remember, doing less things perfectly is better than doing more things in a half-assed manner.

“If you are never really done with it, you can never be held accountable for things that don’t work.”

1. By over-complicating the task, you avoid having to “hand it off”, where it now becomes something out of your control. (Control freaks – this one was for you.)

2. By continuing to noodle with a task or adding complexity, you can avoid having to ever find out if you did it right or not. This is a typical “fear of failure” behavior.

3. You think if it’s not complicated, it has less value, therefor you will be seen as less impressive or successful. We all know people like this.

4. You presume to know what the client or manager will say in response to your completed task (be it a statement of work, a design change, or an initial presentation), so you start trying to answer all the hypothetical responses before you ever get the dialog started. This is often a symptom of control freaks or insecurity.

5. You over-complicate because you can’t back your mind out of where you are in the task. You can no longer see it from a big picture perspective (or even a different perspective) so you get stuck trying to find solutions which all require a high level of complexity due to the fact that you are so immersed in the task or process. The only way to avoid this is to ensure you are getting team feedback and input at critical stages of your process.

6. You don’t want to say goodbye. Once you finish something, it’s truly up for critique, criticism and additional input. If you are never really done with it, you can never really be held accountable for things that don’t work, and you convince yourself that even though you can’t complete it, one day it will prove valuable to something else. This is the hoarder behavior.

So, do any of these behaviors describe you? Have you found ways to avoid over-complication? How do you help others follow the path of least resistance? I’m sure I missed some, so tell us – how else do we manage to over-complicate what could be simple? And why?

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“Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds.” – Albert Einstein

Clients often ask me if we test designs. I usually say no. This is different than usability testing, which has its merits. Unless we are testing for very specific things like, “Can you find where the search box is?” or “Where would you expect to find the blog?”, then I find testing to be a train wreck of an idea. I react particularly negatively to a client who wants us to put up design comps in front of a group of target audience test subjects and simply get their feedback. Here’s why.

If your design (or idea) is really great it will be somewhat unsettling, unusual, different, and predictably cause discomfort with your audience. An “ordinary” audience (being people who are untrained in the art of being uncomfortable for a purpose) will naturally resist something that makes them uncomfortable. That is a reaction at the species level, don’t expect to get a different reaction. If you are testing big picture ideas, concepts, designs, etc., you will be hard pressed to get a favorable reaction from an ordinary group of people, unless of course your idea or design is ordinary.

Don’t ask ordinary people what they think. Ask experts. If you must ask ordinary people ask them very simple questions that keep them focused. Otherwise they will just get anxious because they are seeing something new. Ordinary people’s first reaction to something new is to be skeptical, fearful and otherwise less than pleased. This very human reaction goes back to survival instincts. Different is scary. Ordinary is safe.

As designers and innovators, it is our responsibility to challenge the audience, so long as it suits the long term business objectives of our clients. After all, we aren’t creating works for a museum, we are in the marketing business. In marketing, often that which surprises us or shocks us or makes us feel a bit uncomfortable will end up being the thing we remember. Again, it’s human biology at work, when we get a bit nervous, our adrenal glands produce more adrenaline which in effect creates more lasting memories in our brains. However, that memory needs to also include the primary messaging points as well!

So if you must test innovative work, make sure you get your big picture reactions from experts, and leave the rudimentary tests for the masses. However, if you are really an expert, you shouldn’t need to ask some Joe off the street if they can find the search box.

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I’m not interested in feeling better. When I am at work, I am dealing with problems—my client’s problems, my agency’s problems, somebody’s problem. I always joke that we aren’t designers or programmers, rather we are problem solvers. When I meet with potential clients, they are meeting with us because they think we might be the ones to solve their problems. And, more importantly, we might show them some more problems they didn’t even realize they had.

You know when you get too busy to get a hair cut and your hair just keeps getting worse and worse, until you get used to it? Same thing happens in business, in everything really. You get used to things. You don’t smell the litter box; you aren’t aware of your outdated wardrobe; your hair looks fine to you. This is when you count on a really close friend to have the nerve to tell you, “Hey friend, your hair looks horrible.” While it might sting to hear it, you are thankful because now you can make a decision. Do I get a better hairdo, or am I okay with this horrible one? It’s better to be empowered with the truth than live in denial. That saying “ignorance is bliss” is so very true.

So, when a client hires my company, or we hire another company, I don’t want lip service; I want the cold hard truth. Chances are, I can’t see the immediate problems I am faced with, as I have become used to them. And, even if I can see some, I should assume I can’t see them all.

While I may seek blissful ignorance in certain situations, I prefer to be aware and empowered. And I prefer to do this for others. I don’t want to be told everything is fine when I ask a real question. I want an honest answer based on your opinion. So have one.

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We are often stuck seeing things from a singular perspective. For example, when I go to J.Crew’s website, they expect that I will start to identify myself based on my gender, the type of clothing I am looking for, the color and size I want, etc. They have organized their information and site navigation to let me follow this path, and for the purposes of shopping for a shirt or sweater, that works well.

However, when I visit a college or university Website, and I am often surprised to see the Prospective Students link in the main navigation, along with Current Students, Faculty, Parents, Staff, Alumni. Call me crazy, but shouldn’t this Website be for the prospective students? If it’s the link that is included in all the marketing and admissions materials, the link that is broadcast to the world as the place to find out about the school, the link that every prospective student and their parents will go to in order to find out more, then you bet – this site should be entirely for them. Prospects can include faculty, guests, anyone considering engaging with the school. However, relegating this very important audience to a small navigation item mixed in with the others is a big mistake.

The reason it’s a mistake is because your audience won’t do what you want them to. They will click into all the other sections, and you can bet money the “parents” won’t exclusively spend time in the section just for them. They want the real scoop on what life is going to be like for their child. You see, they aren’t looking for a black shirt sized medium. They are looking to figure out what your school is all about, is it a good fit for them, will they fit in? I would argue that you have to focus the entire experience of the public Website towards the prospective student experience, and direct your existing internal communities to “gateways” where they can get into sites developed exclusively for their needs.

Consider this – as a prospect, I am wondering what my life might be like “if” I was a student, or an alumni, or even as a professor at the school down the road. I know I am a prospective student right now, but I am investigating the possibility of becoming something else, and this “something else” is what I want to see and learn more about.

Typically the current students, alumni, faculty and staff are not going to be looking for the same information a prospective student will be seeking, and vice versa. So create the portals and intranets to serve your internal audiences, and stop trying to steer your audience to places they won’t go. This will also save you the trouble of having to explain the confusion you have created by giving these prospects a gateway while also expecting them to navigate throughout other parts of the site, having them constantly wondering, is “this” for me?

Agree with me, disagree with me? Have an example of a college or university you think is doing things the right way? Leave a comment or a link, and thanks for joining the conversation!

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