Oct 17 2007
How to survive a redesign of your website
Once you make the decision to redesign your website, it seems that everybody in your organization wants to get involved and join the committee because this is fun stuff. This is both good and bad. Good because there is value to insights from different points of view, bad because the process of collaboration can muddy the waters and bring implementation to a grinding halt. It’s too easy to plan a redesign that goes far beyond the intended scale and consequently results in a blown budget and time line. Worse yet, poorly managed collaboration will prevent great results.
So how we do we collaborate, create a great website and not miss our deadline by 6 months?
1. Add 6 months to the schedule (just kidding). But if you’ve never gone through a redesign and you’re constructing a time line, build as much wiggle room as you can get away with. You need to plan for a fluid process that allows changes in direction.
2. Objectives are king. If tactical proposals interfere with the objectives, they are not considered unless an agreement is reached to change the objectives.
Here’s a sample list of objectives:
- Improve the depth of user experience while maintaining speed and ease of use
- Streamline the checkout process
- Enhance the user profile process for behavioral targeting
- Allow more comprehensive merchandising opportunities in the navigation and site search
- Improve the branding experience while maintaining speed and ease of use
- Build a more comprehensive administrative tool that frees the programmers from updating the site
- Complete on time and within budget
This is a simple concept that most managers understand, but there is a good deal of subjective decision-making that makes it all the more important to cite the “objectives are king” mantra and follow through. A good way to deal with tactics that fall outside of the objectives is to list them as enhancements to be considered at a later date so participants don’t feel inclined to sabotage the process.
3. Keep a core group of no more than 3 individuals to engage in the day-to-day decision-making and limit access to the remainder of the group while keeping them informed of progress on a week-to week-basis. The process of building wire-frames and design of the look-and-feel needs to remain within this small group. If the President and VP’s are part of your committee, you may want them to examine the design before it’s forwarded to the engineers to avoid blowing your budget. Seth Godin also addressed this issue with a different bent in his article How to Create a Great Website.
4. Go ahead and invite the committee, key vendors and experts outside your organization to participate. Just make sure they’re in the front-end of the process. Then they need to go away until the user testing phase.
5. Expect that user testing will expose an enormous list of problems and additional demands for more features. If you don’t have a thick skin, you’ll need to get one. The ability to manage criticism at this point will make or break you. Prioritize the list into 3 categories: 1) Must fix now, 2) Enhancements for later, 3) Sorry, we’re not going there. Do the must fix now and get on with implementation. You can come back always come back and tweak after you go live.
I invite you to share stories on site designs.
