In our industry it’s common knowledge that a DYO (or “Design Your Own“) website is one of the trickiest things a web/interactive/design company can undertake.

First of all, paid work always comes first. So despite your best efforts the DYO falls by the wayside, only to just get going again before another paid job sweeps everyone off their feet.

Then you have internal wrangles – we are all “the client” – as well as “the experts” – as well as, well, “everything else!”

So that’s why the Click Suite website redesign, in dribs and drabs, took around 12 months.

I led the Strategy and Information Design.

Here’s a reminder of what the old site looked like:

CLICK SUITE HOMEPAGE (2008)

Where it got to now isn’t a happy accident…

BASED ON A STRATEGY

Click Suite decided to “walk the talk” and kicked-off the DYO process by working with me to create their own ‘Interactive Strategy’.

The Strategy included:

• A vision statement for the company.
• An analysis of where we believe Click Suite sit in the marketplace (and where they want to get to).
• Profiles of their diverse target audience, their goals (and how Click Suite will meet them).
• How Click Suite will measure the success of the new website.

You can design a website or interactive without a strategy, but having one makes the intention of the website more focused and with purpose.

Here’s what it looked like…

VISION

So why have a website? Is it just an online brochure? A portfolio? A place for people to find our email address? Well, all of those, but what makes it special?

Click Suite’s vision statement was about making it clear that they do (great) interactive media and want to “wow!” people with their work and ideas.

MARKET DIFFERENTIATORS

Click Suite picked six similar companies in NZ and I conducted a competitive analysis (based on each company’s website presence).

It was clear that the Click Suite website (built over six years ago) was showing its age. Most of its competitors had freshly designed websites. But despite this, in terms of content and services, all the websites felt fairly similar.

WHERE THEY CAN BE DIFFERENT

It’s tempting to be different just for the sake of it, but in some cases it’s OK to be like everyone else. For example, it is important to establish to the user they are in the right place and what they can expect to find, so the new website has an upfront explanation of what Click Suite does.

I also identified areas where Click Suite can be a little bit different and where they could be very different from the competition.

GAP ANALYSIS

TARGET AUDIENCE

Who will visit the website? Click Suite works closely with their customers every day so already had a good understanding of their audience.

Industries they frequently work with include Museums, Government, Business, Ad Agencies and Software/Web companies. The roles of the people inside these companies include Curators, Communications Managers, Marketing Managers and Ad Agency executives.

Their ideal client is someone prepared to try something new. They want their business/offering to stand out from the crowd. Typically the Managing Director of a company, this person organises and takes responsibility for the effective operation of their organisation as well as its overall strategic direction.

GOALS

I listed the questions customers were likely to ask (in their heads) when they visit the Click Suite website.

For example:

• Who is Click Suite?
• So, what do they do?
• Who have they worked with?
• What does their work look like?
• How does it stack up against the best?
• OK, so lots of awards, but how has their work been successful? (for their clients).
• Can I trust this company to deliver?

The website attempts to answer all these questions.

SUCCESS MEASURES

How will Click Suite know their redesign has succeeded?

Here’s a few of the factors I recommended they measure:

• You get inquiries via the website.
• Engagements for work via website referrals.
• People say “I saw that on your website”.
• Subscriptions to their newsletter.
• They get comments on their blog.

I also measured success by conducting usability testing on our site and monitoring usage statistics. One such measurement is Google PageRank.

The old Click Suite website had average visibility on Google with a PageRank of five. To ensure good exposure in New Zealand a ranking of six is desirable, and for international a rank of seven or higher.

I’m happy to report that the new site now ranks a six. Their latest goal is to get to a seven (the same as Trade Me).

PROMOTION

The old Click Suite website had a small ‘foot print’ on the web with average visibility. I changed their thinking to view the website as part of a much wider network – the world wide web.

You’ll now also find Click Suite on twitter, Vimeo and LinkedIn.

CONCEPTUAL DESIGNS

Click Suite set its designer loose on some early concepts. The themes were ‘play’, ‘learn’ and ‘explore’.

EXPLORING THEMES

ROADMAP

The roadmap is like a high-level plan split into three stages of work. Each stage has a focus – with an explanation of how it will add value to both the business and customers.

The focus of the first stage was to show that “Click Suite has got great ideas”. Future phases intend to add more detail about Click Suite’s team and services and provide the ability for visitors to add their own contributions to the website.

INFORMATION DESIGN

The Information Design started with the concept of allowing the user to switch between different modes of navigation (Relationship, Pictures, Text).

Here’s an early concept for the ‘relationship’ mode…

EXPLORING NAVIGATION APPROACHES

But Click Suite decided this was too ambitious with the limited time and people available, so ‘Plan B’ kicked in.

Plan B focused more on the portfolio viewer – which allows you explore projects in sequential order or filter the portfolio to view projects within a certain industry (e.g. Museums) or technology (e.g. Touchscreens).

HOMEPAGE PAPER PROTOTYPE

VISUAL DESIGN

The visual design had to showing off Click Suite’s work as well as complement a variety of visual styles ranging from 1995 to the present.

The swirly animations help guide your way through the new website – these were hand-drawn and are now extending their way into our document templates, presentations and, eventually, our business cards.

VISUAL DESIGN MOCKUP

DEVELOPMENT

If you’re technically inclined you might notice that the website is created in Adobe Flash, but it acts a lot like an HTML website!

The back button remembers where you’ve been, you can bookmark specific pages and lots of other clever stuff invisible to the naked eye.

USABILITY TESTING

Here are the results of the first round of usability testing on a working prototype of the website.

We tested the site with both staff and customers – setting them tasks followed by a questionnaire to gauge their impressions. We then worked to fix the issues and move the green line to a rating of four and above.

USABILITY TEST ANALYSIS (SURVEY)

THE RESULT

So how did Click Suite go with the DYO?

Only time will tell and Click Suite would love your feedback!

While it was tempting to design a wildly creative website with whacky navigation and hidden content, the new website mixes a bit of the traditional with a bit of the new.

The site is visually rich, but still looks and acts like a website. The large portfolio images can be presented in a variety of formats – still images, animation or video.

The case study text underneath each project has the flexibility to change and extend over time. For example, in future we plan to add cross-links to related projects and technologies.

Check it out…

• Extensive work portfolio (Tip: to move through the portfolio you can click the on-screen arrows or use the left and right arrows on your keyboard)
• Some fabulous ideas
• Dozens of awards
• Top notch services
• About the company, its people and how their clients have benefited from working with them
• Where to find Click Suite and keep in touch

Still coming… (sometime in 2010)

• HTML version of the website (for the few organisations which block Flash).
• SmartPhone version.
• Ability to filter projects by client.

Photo Credit: Mitch Haaseth, Bravo

The straight-talking Ozzie, Tabatha Coffey lends her sound advice and styling expertise to help make over America one salon at a time in this new series (Friday’s, 9.30pm on TV3).

In the vein of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, Tabatha cleans up failing businesses with a keen eye for the customer experience and broken business processes.

Her formula is simple…

• For a day she observes the business.
• She then sends in some mystery customers to gauge their experience.
• She feeds her observations back to the business owners and staff.
• She then fixes the broken parts of the business process (in last Fridays show, a phone-book sized staff instruction manual was painfully shredded).
• Next she hones in on the staff through up-skilling, and gives those who are failing a chance to learn and improve.

What I also like is that she allows staff to have more freedom over how they work, so long as the business benefits and the customer experience is improved.

Later she returns to check if her action plan has worked. She checks the financial performance of the business, staff morale and customer satisfaction.

As a viewer we are enraptured by the sharp-shooting and frank honesty of Tabatha’s whirlwind analysis. It’s all so obvious! We baulk at the abject stupidity of the business owners (usually in tears after Tabatha’s biting analysis), and at the amazing ignorance of the staff who treat their customers as if they are an annoyance and/or a chance to experiment with scissors and hair dye.

But some of us shouldn’t feel so smug at watching these poor people be frazzled and fried in public.

The fact is that when you’re working inside a business the flaws are not always obvious. Personally, I experience poor customer service all the time from car parks, coffee houses, banks, government agencies, clothing retailers and so on.

Of course we are only human, I don’t expect perfection, but it only takes two or three consistently bad experiences in a row for me to switch providers.

Over the course of several years the accumulated lost value of my custom could be costing these businesses hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of dollars of lost revenue. And assuming some other customers have also walked, multiply that to add up as the reason why too many businesses are only just surviving.

It usually takes someone with fresh eyes to sort out where and why a business is falling short on the customer experience. In the IT industry these people are often known as ‘user experience’ experts. But unfortunately they are often restricted to a narrow view of the business – its online interactions with customers.

‘Service Design‘ is the “design for experiences that reach people through many different touch-points, and that happen over time”. It takes in the big picture and is where I believe all service-based businesses need to align their thinking.

The redesign of a service may involve re-organising the back-office activities performed by the service provider (e.g. how phone calls from customers are processed internally) and the redesign of interfaces and interactions that customers use to interact with the business (e.g. a website or in person).

Typically, just like Tabatha’s Salon Takeover, the work is based upon deep insights gathered by shadowing service users. This technique produces more accurate insights in to the usability of a service than remote surveys because what people say they do is frequently different to what they actually do.

Concepts and ideas are captured in sketches and service prototypes – methods similar to those already used by business analysts and user experience consultants. The strong visual approach, combined with rapid prototyping and testing of services and interfaces, delivers real value in today’s competitive markets.

So if you’re a business owner, service delivery manager, business analyst or user experience consultant I suggest you take a deep breath and start watching a few episodes of Tabatha’s Salon Takeover and Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Imagine if this was your own workplace – what would they find?

We could all learn what good service is really about and get on the path to improving your customer experience, your staff happiness index and bottom line.

When you try and mess with the method it gets messy.Photo by H is for Home

Does it matter? Sort of.

It matters when your job is to take a look at how a company runs its design and production line.

Over the years I’ve re-engineered the in-house processes for a handful of IT and New Media companies. I’ve learnt that, while you can redesign the process, when you try and mess with the method it gets messy.

So what do I mean when I say ‘process’ and ‘method’? To me there’s a clear distinction between the two.

I wanted to see if some of my industry colleagues thought the same. I asked “What do you think is the difference (or not) between ‘process’ and ‘method’?

• Colleague #1: “For me, method is the philosophical framework; process is the way your (client, employer) systems requires you to execute it.”
• Colleague #2: “Process is the street. Method is the car you drive. Or in your case, a bicycle.”
• Colleague #3: “On one level they can be used interchangeably but on another, ‘method’ is closer to ‘tool’ or ‘technique’ . . and process is the structured application of a combo of tools.”

To keep life simple this is how I deal with it:

Process = a systematic framework containing a series of milestone deliverables. It is a structure which holds everything together and gives the team focus.

Method = the techniques used to create each deliverable. The method can vary depending on a number of factors:

• The type of project.
• The project constraints (time/budget).
• The client.
• The practioner.
• The team dynamic.

An example – within the Click Suite process we have a phase of work called ‘user research’. The milestone for the user research is a report including a set of persona (user) profiles.

The method we choose depends on the factors listed above, but this doesn’t affect the process. There are many different ways to approach user research – we could do online quantitative research to gather user data, interview people or create video dairies. On top of this the practioner assigned to deliver the milestone will also have their own unique experience, ideas and methods.

So while I’ve found that people are keen to work with a new process they will resistant change if you mess with their methods.

Any process that is too detailed or rigid is also setting itself up for failure. That’s why I design the process around milestones – this creates a common goal and short hops to the utlimate end goal (in our case this is usually a website or interactive).

So my magic formula for success is to keep it simple and to recognise the difference between process and method. You can tinker with the process, but unless you’ve got a good reason, don’t mash the method!