In order to explain this idea, let's start from a fact: a website, application, marketing campaign, electronic newsletter, whatever you call the activity, must have at least one objective. This objective may be to capture contact data (a step of the customer journey), read a note, share information with third parties, in short; The objectives and scope are as particular for each company as the proposed design options. For this reason, the fulfillment of this objective will be only one step in a broader chain; it must be measured, evaluated and improved. Who will benefit from the correct execution of the task? Possibly your sales area or perhaps the writing area in your editorial department. For this reason, we must add these groups of people to the decision-making process. I can assure you that more than one area of your company or business will be involved if you think about it carefully.
Well, we already have objectives, we already have those involved, we already have one or more designers, what's next? The exchange of ideas and needs of your company combined with the experience of a design and development team can begin the design process. This process can also be as particular as your own business and the scope you are looking for with the new image required: it could go through a very detailed design process, going through the wireframe, look and feels until you reach a finished website, optimal and visible in all common browsers and devices; Or we could go through a more design thinking methodology and start with short, easily usable and measurable solutions; or perhaps a methodology with a scrum approach prioritizing tasks of what you need.
Consider this and I leave it more as an invitation not to forget: don't take your eyes off the objectives. It will be useless to invest time and thousands of emails to decide whether to change the color of a button; It will not bring anything innovative to copy the image from another page just because a high-ranking person really likes it (hippo company?), in the end the other page came to that design because they have their own objectives . Remember that in the digital world we have beta tests, A/B tests, experiments and an endless number of tools that, together, businesses and agencies we can use to mutate the application to an experience with better results. In summary, design should not stop at the first step, it is a constant process always in search of achieving objectives.
I don't doubt that we all want a site so interactive, colorful and, why not, addictive, with which we think we can achieve all the objectives, a design panacea that meets all the objectives no matter what they are, but, let's be realistic , that cannot be applied and I will spare myself arguments to explain this point, it simply does not exist and at least at this stage of history it will not exist.
To finish, I would like to leave you a couple of images of websites, clearly with very antagonistic objectives, but I would like them to serve as an example to reframe the initial question, what design should my website have? I hope this article has helped you take the first step in answering that question.
Do you know the Google search engine website? In reality, it would be the example of a "so simple" design, but perfectly tailored to its objectives: search. I wouldn't be surprised if in future stages of evolution they end up removing the "Search on Google" button. I guess you don't need the link to see this site.
Do you have a story to tell? Check out The Boat, an online interactive graphic novel. From this page I leave you the link: http://www.sbs.com. au/theboat/
