Design is something everyone has an opinion on but honestly maybe they shouldn’t. The only people that should be directing design decisions are not art directors, designers, project managers, vice presidents or CEOs. The only group of people that should ever be taken seriously when a design decision is in question are the customers of that website. After all those are the people that are buying your products or generating your sales leads not the vice president of widget operations.

All web design should be centered on your unique customers needs, tested and optimized over time.

Unfortunately most companies don’t operate this way and unconsciously decide to collectively argue and spend an unreasonable amount of time on designing their website home page, usually through a large committee with members from each product division. If this describes your company, you are in serious trouble.

If the self appointed web committee or even worse, company appointed web committee stop with their input on the home page design you can consider your company to not only be officially in severe trouble but also on it’s way down a slippery slope with no end in sight because it’s clear they just aren’t seeing the website as a marketing tool like sales or a vital pillar in their business like management.

It continues to make us upset that most companies never ask the simple question of, what are you trying to accomplish with your website? How can you use your website to achieve your organizational objectives? How can your site increase sales, generate leads, reduce support costs or increase the loyalty of your customers?

Most web design projects are prioritized around the home page as the main focus, then category pages followed by detail pages, landing pages and finally form and checkout pages. Generally the higher the page in the site hierarchy the more attention it gets. When you stop to think for a second this makes no sense and is actually very bad business. If you view any site from ROI potential the list of how web projects should be prioritized is completely flipped upside down. Your website form and checkout pages are actually the most important followed by landing pages, detail pages, category level pages and finally home pages. The deeper a visitor is into your web site the more return potential there is for the company. Why then do companies get caught up in ego and design input around the home page when the lesser thought about pages are really what defines success for the company?

For design to have an impact on a business goal, it must revolve around a guiding strategy. To simply design something without an underlying strategy that supports a specific objective will not utilize design as a competitive advantage.

Although the design may be aesthetically pleasing, it may not generate as large an impact on results that you are striving for and may be developed subjectively as opposed to what will have the highest impact. Additionally, there are usually several business goals to meet and the likely hood of intuitively or subjectively maximizing all of them can be difficult, which is where design strategy should be leveraged.

Design strategy is not a particular color, or graphic image, or a logo, or a design concept or any other design element.

A design strategy is an approach to how a particular objective will be accomplished with design or any of design’s core competencies. The design strategy should always be joined to a particular business objective and its purpose is to provide a clear starting point for the team to develop solutions. It provides a measurement against which to analyze the solution. An example would be:

Business Objective:
Improve market share and the bottom line.

Design Strategy:
Develop design concepts that improve the recognizability of the brand across all product groups. Reinforce the brand promise and strengthen the relationship with the customer.

Using a design strategy liberates the creative mind to think out of the box for business solutions and provides you with an advantage over your competition.

Design has a tremendous impact on marketing results, it can make the difference between achieving your business goals and often surpassing them or driving your customers as far away from your objective as possible. Design is far more than simply look and feel and certainly more than an add-on service at the midpoint or end of the development phase. Design is as much scientific as it is instinctual and should never be done without a specific reason. Fundamentally design communicates in a visual way and taps into a subconscious decision making process which words alone cannot achieve.

A simple design element like the position and color of a call to action button or the amount of white space on a web page, if used as part of the design strategy, can enhance or reduce the power of your marketing.

It is no secret that perception is dependent on presentation, which contributes to the response to your marketing message or lack there of. On the web the effect of design is amplified because all any prospective consumer has to go on is your web presence. The visual look, usability and design of your site is your company or product. Your web site is the interface with your potential customer at the time of purchase, when they are considering starting or continuing a relationship with you.

Design has too much of an impact on performance to be reduced to a subjective opinion of whether someone or some committee likes it or dislikes it. Because of this impact on communication it is important to measure and test design just like any other part of your marketing mix. It is also important to note that design testing is not the same as usability testing, which is also vitally important and should not be ignored.

Design testing measures your customers’ behavior in relationship to your brand and can combined with good design can improve your site’s conversion rates. Under the lens of a properly conducted design test there will be no question that design B increases some business metric by x% vs. design C which decreases the same metric.

Measuring design and other web analytics are ultimately good for the business intention. However, there is some backlash within the industry that believes it creates too much of a focus on the short-term. The Creative Thirst solution is to combine design testing with usability testing, along with qualitative data and observation of visitor behavior over time. This combination is the key to developing deeper insights into your customers and is the basis of the continual improvement process that will ensure greater gains to your bottom line through the design in situations where you cannot afford to guess.