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Before You Hire Designers
Before you hire a designer, set up the situation this person needs to be effective. Bringing any employee into an unprepared environment where they don’t have the tools or authority to succeed is unfair to them and a huge waste of your hard-earned money. It also burdens the other employees who aren’t sure what to do with this new person.
A few years ago, I made plans with a friend for breakfast. She was late. When she finally got there, she apologized, saying she’d been cleaning up for the housecleaner.
“Why in the world would you clean up for a housecleaner?!?” I asked.
“So she can actually clean, you idiot.”
This made no sense to me, but I let it go. Otherwise, we would’ve argued about it for hours. About a year later, I got busy enough with work that my house looked like it could star in an episode of Hoarders, so I hired a cleaner. After a few visits, I found myself cleaning up piles and random junk so that she could get to the stuff I actually wanted her to get to.
I called my friend and said, “I get why you had to clean up for the cleaner now.”
“I told you you were an idiot.”
(My friends are great.)
The moral of this story is you can’t drop a designer into your environment and expect them to succeed. You’ve got to clearly lay out your expectations, but you also have to set the stage so your designers come in and get to the stuff you need them to do.
Introducing a new discipline to your workplace
Let’s assume you don’t have a designer on staff. People have been going about their business and getting their work done, and now you’re introducing a designer. Even if your employees have been begging you to hire a designer, this creates a challenge. People are creatures of habit and comfort. As difficult as they claimed their jobs were without a designer, having one still means giving up control of things. This isn’t easy. All the complaining about having to do someone else’s job is about to turn into complaining about giving their work to someone else. People are awesome.
A designer will absolutely change what your company produces, and they’ll also affect how your company operates. You’ll need to adjust your workflows for this new person, as well as being open to having them adjust your workflow once they arrive.
Before you throw someone into the mix, sit the company down and explain why you’re hiring a designer, how the company benefits, and what the designer’s role and responsibilities are. Explain how adding this skill set to your group makes everyone’s job easier. (Including possibly going home earlier!) Thank them for going without a designer for so long. Talk to them about things that they no longer need to undertake because of the new designer. Tell them to expect some bumps as the designer gets integrated into the fold.
Then back your designer up when those bumps occur.
Your designer can’t do shit without support from the person up top. If their job is to go in and change the way people work, the way the product behaves, and the way people interact with each other (all of which design will do), that’s gonna ruffle a few feathers. When a colleague runs into your office and says, “The designer is changing things!” a well-placed “That’s exactly what I’m paying the designer to do” sets the perfect tone. Remember, designers aren’t out there doing it for their own well-being. They’re your representative.
As tough as introducing a designer may be, it’s infinitely easier than introducing a designer into a workplace where a bad designer has been nesting. We’re talking industrial-sized smudge sticks. I once took a job where coworkers would walk to my desk and ask me to whip up signs for their yard sales. When I informed them that wasn’t my job, they replied that the previous designer always did that stuff. I reminded them that the previous designer got fired for not meeting his deadlines. Eventually, they stopped asking. Had I been more willing to bend to their requests, we would’ve forever established that designers are the people who make yard sale signs for coworkers.
Clear the table of any shenanigans like that before your new designer starts. Delivering this message is much easier coming from you. Don’t pass it off to the new person.
Understanding what designers are responsible for
This may sound obvious: a designer is responsible for design, right? By design, I’m talking about not just how something looks, but also how it manifests the solution to the problem it solves. Remember that nice young designer who worked at a big company—the one who wasn’t invited to strategy meetings? By the time work got to him, the decisions were set down to the smallest details and all he did was execute. He wasn’t designing. He was executing on someone else’s design.
In truth, he needed to assert himself. But this chapter is about you. Design is the solution to a problem, something you pay a professional to handle. A designer is, by definition, uniquely qualified to solve those problems; they’re trained to come up with solutions you may not even see. Your designer should champ at the bit to be involved in strategic discussions.
Make sure to use your designer’s skill set completely. Make sure they’re involved in strategy discussions. Make sure they’re involved in solving the problem and not executing a solution that’s handed to them. Most of all, make sure they see this as part of their job. If they don’t, your design will only ever be as good as what people who aren’t designers think up.
Giving designers the authority and space they need
Just as it’s absolutely clear what authority your office manager, accountant, and engineers carry, make sure your company understands what authority your designer has. Let’s go ahead and extend the definition of authority to “things they own.” In the same way the bookkeeper owns the books and the engineer owns the code. (Yes, I get that technically you own it all. Work with me here.)
Trust your designers. Give them the authority to make decisions they’re singularly qualified to make. Before you bring a designer into the company, decide what authority they have over parts of your workflow or product. Do they have the last call on user-interface decisions? Do they need to get input from other stakeholders? (Always a good idea.) Do they need approval from every stakeholder? (Always a political shit show. Trust me.)
The right answer depends on the type of organization you run and the skill level of the designer. But whatever that call is, empower your designer with the maximum amount of agency to do their job well. No one tells the accountant how to do their job, but I’ve been in a hundred workplaces where people told the designer how to do theirs.
A designer with backbone and experience won’t have any problem carving out the room they need to work, but they can’t do so if you don’t grant them the authority. Otherwise, you run the risk of bringing someone in to follow the whims of those around them. That’s not a full member of the team. That’s a glorified Xerox machine, an asset used by the rest of the company whenever they need some pixels pushed around.
That’s how someone who’s supposed to work on your website’s UI ends up making Lost Cat flyers for Betty in HR.
Equipping designers with the tools they need
This should go without saying, except I once spent the first two weeks at a job spinning through a draconian requisition process to get copies of Photoshop and BBEdit, which the company considered nonessential software. Someone from IT gave me a one-hour demo on how I could harness PowerPoint to do anything I needed Photoshop for. (I know I should’ve stopped him, but at some point my annoyance faded in favor of fascination at how much he’d thought this out.)
Like any craftsperson, your designer is only as good as their tools. Make sure they have what they need. Yes, it’s fair to ask them to justify their use. No, you don’t need to understand what everything does. Trust that they do.
Measuring success
How well you prepare your team for a designer, how well your designer gets along with everyone, and how professionally they behave means exactly jack squat if your designer doesn’t succeed in their goals. Before bringing any employee on board, you should know how you’ll measure their success. Will it be hard metrics? Do you expect sales or conversions on the website to increase a certain number? Is the goal to deliver a big upcoming project on time and under budget?
Your business needs vary, so I can’t give you a magical equation for design success. But I can say: whatever your success metric is, make sure your designer both knows about it and has the authority to accomplish it.
I do have a story for you though. I took a contract-to-hire job once, and the creative director sat me down on my first day and told me that he wasn’t sure what to expect of me and how I’d fit in with the rest of the studio. (Someone didn’t get their house in order.) At the end of the contract period, he’d evaluate whether to keep me around. I was young and stupid, so I didn’t press much and decided to blend in as much as possible (rookie mistake). When my contract was up, the creative director called me into his office and said I hadn’t performed the way they’d expected. Which was odd, because neither of us really understood what had been expected. I felt shitty, wondering what I could’ve done better. And honestly, I’m sure the creative director felt shitty too, because he realized he hadn’t properly set expectations for success.
So yeah. Don’t do that. It should never be a surprise to anyone working for you that they’re doing badly. Or doing well for that matter. Let them know what they need to do to succeed. Let them know they’re succeeding. If they’re not succeeding, help them adjust course. And finally, let them know once they’ve succeeded.
Writing the job description
The most important thing about readying for a designer is figuring out how your company or organization benefits from their involvement. What will you be able to do once they’re here? Picture yourselves a year in the future. What do you hope to accomplish? Write those things down. They’re the basis for the job description you’re about to write.
Make a list of what you need this person to do. Not the technical skills they should have, but the needs you hope those skills will fulfill. Do you need branding? Interface design? Illustrations? Forms? What kind of business are you in? Is it editorial? Are you a retailer that needs a catalog designed? Don’t forget to take care of your mobile needs. Trust me, you have mobile needs. (Trust me, you’ve had them since yesterday.)
The result of this exercise may look something like this: “We need a designer with mobile experience that can do branding and interface design for complex data.” The longer that list gets, the more you’ll pay for a designer, and this exercise may help you realize that you need more than one person. A capable illustrator who can build a responsive site and understands agile workflow is a rare unicorn indeed.
Now let’s go find us some designers!
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Antoine Lefeuvre on The Web, Worldwide: The Culinary Model of Web Design
We call ourselves information architects, web designers or content strategists, among other job titles in the industry, including the occasional PHP ninja or SEO rockstar. The web does owe a lot to fields like architecture, industrial design, or marketing. I still haven’t met an interaction cook or maitre d’optimization, though. No web makers turn to chefs for inspiration, one might say.
Well, some do. Let me take you, s’il vous plaît, to Lyon, France, where people think sliced bread is the greatest thing since the internet.
Just a hundred miles from the web’s birthplace at CERN in Geneva lies Lyon, France’s second biggest city. It’s no internet mecca, but that doesn’t mean there are no lessons to be learned from how people make the web there. Unlike many places in the world where the latest new thing is everyone’s obsession, entrepreneurs in Lyon are quite interested in… the nineteenth century! What they’re analyzing is their city’s greatest success, its cuisine.
If Lyon’s food scene today is one the world’s best—even outshining Paris’ according to CNN, this is thanks to the Mères lyonnaises movement. These “mothers” were house cooks for Lyon’s rich people, who decided to emancipate and launch their own start-ups: humble restaurants aiming at top-quality food, not fanciness. The movement begun in the nineteenth century only grew bigger in the twentieth, when the Mères passed on their skills and values to the next generation. Their most famous heir is superstar chef Paul Bocuse, who has held the Michelin three-star rating longer than any other, and who began as the apprentice of Mère Eugénie Brazier, the mother of modern French cooking and one of the very first three-star chefs in 1928. “There’s a real parallel between the ecosystem the Mères started and what we want to achieve,” says Grégory Palayer, president of the aptly named local trade association La Cuisine du Web. To recreate the Mères’ recipe for success, the toqués—the nickname meaning both “chef’s hat” and “crazy” that’s given to La Cuisine du Web members—have identified its ingredients: networking, media support, funding, and transmitting skills and knowledge. Not to mention a secret plus: joie de vivre. “Parisians and Europeans are often surprised to see we can spend two hours having lunch,” says Grégory. “This is how we conduct business here!”
Lyon’s designers too have their nineteenth-century hero in Auguste Escoffier, the celebrity chef of his age. He began his career as a kitchen boy in his uncle’s restaurant and ended up running the kitchens in London’s most luxurious hotels. Renowned as “the Chef of Kings and the King of Chefs,” Escoffier was also a serial designer: his creations include Peach Melba, Crêpe Suzette, and the Cuisine classique style. He even experimented in a culinary form of design under constraint while in the army during the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, using horse meat for ordinary meals to save scarce beef for the wounded, and inventing 1,001 recipes with turnip, the only readily available vegetable on the front lines. Escoffier did much to improve and structure his industry. He was the first head of the WACS , the chefs’ W3C, and revolutionized not only French cooking, but the way restaurants worldwide are run, by championing documentation, standardization, and professionalism.
In his talk “Interaction Béchamel” at the Interaction 14 conference in Amsterdam, Lyon’s IxDA leader Guillaume Berry explained how the life and work of Escoffier could influence web design. Guillaume comes from a family of food lovers and makers. Himself a visual designer and an amateur cook, he is greatly inspired in his daily work by cuisine. “It’s all about quality ingredients and preparing them. I’ve realized this while chopping vegetables—a task often neglected or disliked.” The web’s raw ingredients are copy, images, videos: “Even a starred chef won’t be able to cook a proper dish with low-quality ingredients. Don’t expect a web designer to do wonders without great content.”
Just as Escoffier took Ritz customers on a kitchen tour, Guillaume recommends explaining to your clients how their site or app has been cooked. The more open and understood our design processes are, the more their value will be recognized. Have you ever been running late and prepared dinner in a rush? I have and it was, unsurprisingly, a disaster. So tell your clients their website is nothing but a good meal; it takes time to make it a memorable experience.
Looking back at other industries helps us see what’s ahead in ours. What could be the web’s answer to slow food, organic farming, or rawism? “How many interactions a day is it healthy for us to have?” asks Guillaume. He adds, “Cooks have a huge responsibility because depending on how they prepare the food they can make people sick.” Are we designers that powerful? Oh yes, and more—we destroyed the world, after all.
No, the web industry isn’t free of junk food. When we create apps that make a smartphone obsolete after two years: junk food. When we believe email is dead and Facebook is the new communication standard: junk food. When we design only for the latest browsers and fastest connections: junk food.
If we’re ready to move from “more” to “better,” let’s remember these simple rules from Eugénie Brazier: 1. Pick your ingredients very carefully; 2. Home-made first; 3. A flashy presentation won’t save a poor dish.
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Client Education and Post-Launch Success
What our clients do with their websites is just as important as the websites themselves. We may pride ourselves on building a great product, but it’s ultimately up to the client to see it succeed or fail. Even the best website can become neglected, underused, or messy without a little education and training.
Too often, my company used to create amazing tools for clients and then send them out into the world without enough guidance. We’d watch our sites slowly become stale, and we’d see our strategic content overwritten with fluffy filler.
It was no one’s fault but our own.
As passionate and knowledgeable web enthusiasts, it’s literally our job to help our clients succeed in any way we can, even after launch. Every project is an opportunity to educate clients and build a mutually beneficial learning experience.
Meeting in the middle
If we want our clients to use our products to their full potential, we have to meet them in the middle. We have to balance our technical expertise with their existing processes and skills.
At my company, Brolik, we learned this the hard way.
We had a financial client whose main revenue came from selling in-depth PDF reports. Customers would select a report, generating an email to an employee who would manually create and email an unprotected PDF to the customer. The whole process would take about two days.
To make the process faster and more secure, we built an advanced, password-protected portal where their customers could purchase and access only the reports they’d paid for. The PDFs themselves were generated on the fly from the content management system. They were protected even after they were downloaded and only viewable with a unique username and password generated with the PDF.
The system itself was technically advanced and thoroughly solved our client’s needs. When the job was done, we patted ourselves on the back, added the project to our portfolio, and moved on to the next thing.
The client, however, was generally confused by the system we’d built. They didn’t quite know how to explain it to their customers. Processes had been automated to the point where they seemed untrustworthy. After about a month, they asked us if we’d revert back to their previous system.
We had created too large of a process change for our client. We upended a large part of their business model without really considering whether they were ready for a new approach.
From that experience, we learned not only to create online tools that complement our clients’ existing business processes, but also that we can be instrumental in helping clients embrace new processes. We now see it as part of our job to educate our clients and explain the technical and strategic thought behind all of our decisions.
Leading by example
We put this lesson to work on a more recent project, developing a site-wide content tagging system where images, video, and other media could be displayed in different ways based on how they were tagged.
We could have left our clients to figure out this new system on their own, but we wanted to help them adopt it. So we pre-populated content and tags to demonstrate functionality. We walked through the tagging process with as many stakeholders as we could. We even created a PDF guide to explain the how and why behind the new system.
In this case, our approach worked, and the client’s cumbersome media management time was significantly reduced. The difference between the outcome of the two projects was simply education and support.
Education and support can, and usually does, take the form of setting an example. Some clients may not fully understand the benefits of a content strategy, for instance, so you have to show them results. Create relevant and well-written sample blog posts for them, and show how they can drive website traffic. Share articles and case studies that relate to the new tools you’re building for them. Show them that you’re excited, because excitement is contagious. If you’re lucky and smart enough to follow Geoff Dimasi’s advice and work with clients who align with your values, this process will be automatic, because you’ll already be invested in their success.
We should be teaching our clients to use their website, app, content management system, or social media correctly and wisely. The more adept they are at putting our products to use, the better our products perform.
Dealing with budgets
Client education means new deliverables, which have to be prepared by those directly involved in the project. Developers, designers, project managers, and other team members are responsible for creating the PDFs, training workshops, interactive guides, and other educational material.
That means more organizing, writing, designing, planning, and coding—all things we normally bill for, but now we have to bill in the name of client education.
Take this into account at the beginning of a project. The amount of education a client needs can be a consideration for taking a job at all, but it should at least factor into pricing. Hours spent helping your client use your product is billable time that you shouldn’t give away for free.
At Brolik, we’ve helped a range of clients—from those who have “just accepted that the Web isn’t a fad” (that’s an actual quote from 2013), to businesses that have a team of in-house developers. We consider this information and price accordingly, because it directly affects the success of the entire product and partnership. If they need a lot of education but they’re not willing to pay for it, it may be smart to pass on the job.
Most clients actually understand this. Those who are interested in improving their business are interested in improving themselves as well. This is the foundation for a truly fulfilling and mutually beneficial client relationship. Seek out these relationships.
It’s sometimes challenging to justify a “client education” line item in your proposals, however. If you can’t, try to at least work some wiggle room into your price. More specifically, try adding a 10 percent contingency for “Support and Training” or “Onboarding.”
If you can’t justify a price increase at all, but you still want the job, consider factoring in a few client education hours and their opportunity cost as part of your company’s overall marketing budget. Teaching your client to use your product is your responsibility as a digital business.
This never ends (hopefully)
What’s better than arming your clients with knowledge and tools, pumping them up, and then sending them out into the world to succeed? Venturing out with them!
At Brolik, we’ve started signing clients onto digital strategy retainers once their websites are completed. Digital strategy is an overarching term that covers anything and everything to grow a business online. Specifically for us, it includes audience research, content creation, SEO, search and display advertising, website maintenance, social media, and all kinds of analysis and reporting.
This allows us to continue to educate (and learn) on an ongoing basis. It keeps things interesting—and as a bonus, we usually upsell more work.
We’ve found that by fostering collaboration post-launch, we not only help our clients use our product more effectively and grow their business, but we also alleviate a lot of the panic that kicks in right before a site goes live. They know we’ll still be there to fix, tweak, analyze, and even experiment.
This ongoing digital strategy concept was so natural for our business that it’s surprising it took us so long to implement it. After 10 years making websites, we’ve only offered digital strategy for the last two, and it’s already driving 50 percent of our revenue.
It pays to be along for the ride
The extra effort required for client education is worth it. By giving our clients the tools, knowledge, and passion they need to be successful with what we’ve built for them, we help them improve their business.
Anything that drives their success ultimately drives ours. When the tools we build work well for our clients, they return to us for more work. When their websites perform well, our portfolios look better and live longer. Overall, when their business improves, it reflects well on us.
A fulfilling and mutually beneficial client relationship is good for the client and good for future business. It’s an area where we can follow our passion and do what’s right, because we get back as much as we put in.
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