How to Tackle a Design

April 23, 2009 | David Raffauf

Do you need to come up with a website or application (re)design and you’re not sure where to start?  This is the process I typically run through for the design portion of my projects.  These are some basic strategies that can be applied to many different scenarios.

What Do You Want Visitors to See?

This may sound like a condescending question, but it isn’t.  It’s one of the hardest questions to answer, especially when there are multiple stakeholders for your website.  Think about your homepage.  Make a list of everything you could possibly want to show, now assign 10 votes to these pieces of content.  You can vote for one piece of content 0 times, or 10 times, but no fractional votes.  After distributing these 10 votes among your content, you’ll have a plan for weighting these elements visually within your design.

What Do You Want Visitors to Do?

It’s best if you can limit your most important pages to one call to action.  The action could be signing up, viewing a product or giving you a call.  But try to narrow it down to one thing.  If you have more than one action, try to color code them by audience.  Or, visually designate one action as the primary and have one or two secondary actions.

Wireframes as Blueprints

The goal of wireframing is to layout your pages and workflows.  They help to determine where items should appear, how large they will be and the order in which they will appear.  It’s really important to iterate over the wireframes until everyone is satisfied.  These wireframes then serve as a blueprint that everyone involved in the project can use to get started.  They’re your game plan.  They’re also big money savers; fixing solutions here is multiples cheaper than once you’re coding and doing visual design.

Visual Design

Generally there are two approaches to take.  You can look around at other businesses in your industry and try to develop a look that is similar to what they have.  This is the safe route and probably the least time consuming.  It makes you look credible but the drawback is that you don’t stand out.  Someone who visits your website might return to your competitor’s site to place an order, never realizing what happened.  If you’re willing to try to differentiate yourself, you should consciously break the visual language of your niche.  Pick a different color, a different voice or play up your key business differentiator.  I think you’ll get the most bang for your buck in the long-term from this approach.

Signing Up, Subscribing, Contacting and Purchasing

If drawing readers, customers or mailing list subscribers is your thing then this is for you.  You need an easy and obvious way for users to sign up or sign in.  Don’t ask a dozen questions, don’t sign people up automatically for emails and make it clear what the benefits are of signing up.  You want to lose as few people here as possible.  This is a major conversion point.  The same goes for making a sale.  Only require as much input from your visitors as is immediately required.

Sharing

Likewise, it’s good to make it easy for users to invite friends.  This could be an optional second step after signing up.  You can also build an audience by allowing visitors to easily share your site by email or on social bookmarking websites.

That s a Good Start

There have been volumes written on all these topics, but this gives you a rough idea of where to start.  As you can tell it’s a mix of business decisions, structure and style.  When working with a designer make sure they’re doing their best to learn what’s most important to your business and customers.