TRANSIENT POD » strategy

What does a website cost?

admin — Thu, 12 May 2011 15:48:31 +0000

I know there have been a lot of postings on this topic in the past. As an educator at the Vancouver Film School Digital Design program this is one of the most asked questions. So here is a breakdown of my thoughts and one of the most famous design quotes to kick it off .

” If I had asked people what they wanted, They would have said faster horses.” - Henry Ford

The creative process is a collaboration between the client and designer. Leverage the insight of both parties to maximize your results. Let’s look at the design process through these two lenses.

The Client

As a client are you willing to use 10 -35% of your annual revenue to create the proper experience for your organization?

Most designers have specialized training, specialized equipment, and a great deal of talent in order to deliver effective solutions based on organizational needs. Design is not about making things pretty, it is about solving problems, connecting people and growing businesses. When you hire a designer you are not hiring someone who understands how to use a piece of software; you are hiring someone who understands design culture, trends, and opportunities.

As a client you are a business owner who wants good value and the best ROI (return on investment) possible. This is where you should leverage a designers experience to understand what you want to accomplish. What are your organizational and growth goals? Why do you need the website? What purpose does is serve? How does it fit in with your portfolio of products and services? Is it experientially driven, transactionally driven or other? Do you require a or a brand direction? What is the difference between a brand and a logo (I.D.?) Do you require any education around brand touch points and how this affects the consumer’s perception of the company? Are you looking to move a product into a lifestyle experience? and so on…. Good designers should help your identify and find clarity or your needs.

Most organizations spend 30-60% of their revenue on marketing in order to grow new business. A good portion of this can go into an interactive / brand design or re-design. The most simple website will usually require at a minimum a few weeks of a designers time. Free lance designers operate similarly to trades people. Think about the cost of plumbers, carpenters, and electricians. Designers are no different and they provide sustained results for your organization. In my career I have worked on sites that cost anywhere from $6,000 – $250,000 and software applications that range from $30,000 -$40 million. Websites that cost from $600 – $10,000 per page.

In return you have an organization with clear goals and communication strategies. Interactive brand experiences that consider all touch points of the consumer journey. Each design medium is a strategic work of art that considers finadability, learnability, assistance, narrative, informational design, hierarchies, user flows, telemetry, visual identity, composition, typography, color theory, emotional responses, motivations, compulsions, calls to action, and social interactions. “Design is a consideration of things.” Success if born through your ability to collaborate and empower your design team.

The Designer

Are you being paid for your ideas or how you can transform ideas into products and services that work for a core consumers?

Clients generally do not understand all the costs involved in design. It is a foreign field and most of the time need to be some education involved. First and foremost I believe all designers must protect the integrity of our field. So step one is to price accordingly and remember every region has different rates. San Francisco, New York, Vancouver, Miami, Los Angeles etc. Things are going to cost more relative to your geographical location, and the cost of living. A designer in the Midwest and Prairies can live on a lower salary than most coastal cities.

Remember that your rates need to consider resources / talent, computers, software, specialized equipment, locations, releases, fees, dues, consumables, printing, typefaces, stock art, building leases, insurance, etc. As a designer you want to price fairly and ensure that you are unique selling proposition is not your price, but rather your success record. I great mentor once told me ” it takes most people 50 yrs to understand their value. You are not being paid for your knowledge of tools. You are being paid for your experience and ability to captain the creative process.”

In your first meeting you should listen and work with clients to understand their organizational goals. As the Creative Strategist at Transient Pod, I try to find clarity early. My first hour is always free and if I cannot help the client after the first hour I will give him a list of companies that I believe can.

The tricky conversation for most designers is often around pricing. If you find yourself in a situation where you are working with a small business then you can always try to draw relationships to value. A clients perception of value is key here. But proceed with caution. We have all experienced clients who are looking for a $10,000 website for $500. If early on a client does not understand the value you bring then I suggest you move on. You must protect the integrity of your own brand and service offering. If you decided to proceed then conversations with clients around costs in their lives can be a good start. Have you ever had a massage, taken a golf lesson, been to the spa, dined at a nice restaurant? Usually the answer is yes. Then I ask what it cost? Usually it is somewhere between $100 – $350 dollars. Then I ask how long the experience was. Usually about 1 -3 hrs. Ok so you are willing to pay $50 – $175/ hr for a good or entertaining experience. How much would you be willing to pay if that hour could increase your bottom line by 2, 5, 10, or 20% or more?

Also remember success metrics. Not all projects have metrics that have a direct correlation to the bottom line. Remember marketing can increase traffic and exposure but if the product or interactive experience does not meet the consumers expectations, then conversion can be low. Your metrics for a campaign are tied to traffic. If you are being hired to think of the entire user experience then you need to understand how exposure converts to transactions and churn. You will have to understand current telemetry and create metrics against this data.

Designers must also remember the design A, B, C’s. Are they in order? What is your creative capacity and does it align with the needs of the organization you are serving? Are you willing to use your experience to challenge the ideas of the client and deliver beyond their expectations? As designers your job is to understand the organizational needs of a client and provide the correct design solution for both them and the target consumers. Create an appropriate consumer insight strategy that clearly understands the goals of your target audience and allows you to develops strong personas. Understanding motivations is the only way you can effectively design desirable solutions. “Design is a consideration of things.” Success if born through your ability to manage the expectations of your client through communication, collaboration and a results driven design philosophy.

A Scenario

You are a small business who needs an interactive brand presence (website) and you have never created or are looking to re-align your brand strategy. How much time would this take to create?

First the brand. Branding is usually broken down into two areas. How the consumers feels about your product and service and the internal mantra / war cry you want to communicate to your organization to drive future growth. A lot of the time small businesses are looking for just an ID (identity.) A logotype that consumers can associate with the company, but I would encourage a client to talk to their designers because a proper brand strategy better helps support the organizational goals of the company. It also solidifies your vision and mission statements.

Second is the experience. How big is the experience. How many pages is the site, or experience? How much content is going to be involved? Does it need to work on computers only? Or does it need to work on computer, smart phones, and social networks. What technology is required? Flash does not work on most apple portable devices? Do you require a software engineer to create a server side application? Are their images, visual assets etc? If not the project will require a photo shoot, illustrations, or another kind of asset creation. Does the client what a specific typeface? What is the cost of this typeface? Who is going to write the content for the site? Do you need creative editorial writing or Search Engine Optimized writing for the web? An the biggest an most overlooked; who is going to maintain the website / brand experience?

Here is a breakdown of what goes into a project. The number of hours is dependent on the complexity, technology needs, and scope of the project.

Brand Strategy & Logo

- Research on competitive / competitive analysis
- Perceptual Mapping (understanding where you organization lives relative to others)
- Development of brand character, attributes, values, mission and vision statement
- Identification of target audience / persona creation (archetypes of your target consumer)
- Development of logo, logotype etc

Interactive – Web, Devices, Presentation

- Requirements gathering
- Finding Inspiration / Mood boards / Emotional Touch points
- Content Inventory (core information on the experience, identify calls to action CTA’s)
- Wireframes, user flows, interactive stories,
- Conceptual Mock Ups
- Visual Asset creation (photos, illustrations, images)
- Photo shoot or Stock Image purchases
- Writing for web, editorial writing, content strategy
- Production Ready Comps – Interfaces
- Style Guides and Graphic Standards
- Front End Development – Presentation Layer – Flash, PHP, Javacript,
- Server Side Engineering- Database, AI, E-commerce,
- Deployment and bug tracking
- Ongoing maintenance
- Ongoing writing for web / blogging

This is is only a rough outline. There can be more, less and everything in between. It does illustrate that even the most basic website requires a lot of work. The old analogy that was shared with me earlier in my career is this. A client will ask a designer for a Maple Sausage. Clients don’t need to understand everything that went into making the sausage, but it does have to taste like maple and the client needs to willing to pay for the production costs.

Every Designer Should Know the ABC’s

admin — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 21:38:49 +0000

Regardless of the starting point, the purpose of an incubation process is to ensure a concept is aligned and meets the audience, business, and creative goals of a project. Teams can frame ideas around specific business need or marketing initiatives or you can leverage specific consumer insight data to create ideas based on the desires and lifestyles of your audience. The ABC’s prove that your idea works and eliminates key risks. Here are some design tips to help you create experiences:

A – Understand your Audience / Consumers

Get Pure Data:

Remember the best information you can get from consumers is unpolluted and not subjective. Pure ethnographic research is always the best starting point. Being able to create a strategy for seeing how people use products in context of their lifestyle is critical to identifying new opportunities and validating design assumptions. Here is the classic examples: If you were to ask men how many of them washed their hands after leaving a washroom; 10/10 would tell you they did. If you actually observed them you would find that only 7/10 actually washed their hands. As designers we must see past the data. Phase two would be to understand why people do and do not wash their hands. We need to understand motivations – Time, efficiency, fear, naive….

Educate your Key Stakeholders

Designers must educate key stakeholders on personas as design tools. Personas are archetypes based on research and contextual inquiries that designers use in crafting experiences. They are a snapshot that communicates a target consumers motivations for behaviour. Marketing demographics only tell you who owns the lexus, not why they bought it. You must understand a consumers behaviour in order to properly validate brand strategies and tailor products and services to work with consumer lifestyles.

Remember the differences between Usable and Ease of Use

Remember each system, product or service has a learning curve. This learning curve directly corresponds to the value vs investment model in your consumers mind. If something is easy to use, you have simplified your solutions to be clear, easy to navigate and highly learnable. If you are designing a system, product or service that has layers of meaning and features you must ensure the education and learning curves compliment the users motivations and end goals.

Understand Mental Models & Usability

Usability is the degree to which a tool is easy to use and understand. Products such as lego are easy to use because they conform to our understanding of the world. A mental model is the user’s thought process for how something works. When something works with our existing mental models we find it easy to use. When something forces us to make new mental models we find it hard to use. You want to leverage what consumers already know in order to make things easy to use.

Provide Reward

Many experiences are serendipitous or exploratory in nature. Games are based on one simple concept. As humans we like to learn, and being able to test and validate this is a rewarding way equals fun. Understanding how to properly reward your consumers during each learning cycle is key. Games have done this well for years and these systems are being built into almost every product experience we interact with today. Understanding and incorporating game design systems should be apart of your design cycle.

Create Meaningful Experiences

Users demand experiences more than basic experiences. This transcendes from products and services being functional, affordable, emotional, aspirational, and meaningful. Many interactive and communication design pieces are very good at completing the first three layers, but moving beyond requires a strong brand and sustained product strategy that considers your consumers life goals and lifestyle. The best example is the Wii Fit. A company that has always prided themselves on innovation, has a great brand and now creates experiences that reward, educate and align with the life goals of the user. Wii Consumers: Experience Alignment- I enjoy games, I am intimidated by complex controls, I like social experiences. Goal Alignment – I want to achieve, I want to loose weight, I want more information about my fitness level, I want to feel good about my self, I want more self confidence…. All this from a single experience. No wonder it has grossed more than two billion worldwide.

The Pareto Principle or Efficiency

Based on the 80/20 principle. 80% of effects come from 20% of the people. There are many applications of this.

If you create a product or service only 20% of your designs will be utilized by your designers. You can focus on usability issues here.
As a designer it can take you 20% of the time to be 80% complete, where the final 20% can take 80% of the time

User Testing

Remember you can quickly validate your designs. By testing on 8 people who fit your persona profile you can assume it works for 85% of your user base.

B – Understand the Business

Have Clear Success Metrics

Often overlooked but the critical success metric is usually the business driver. Consumers can enjoy products but if it is not viable in the marketplace then unless you are creating something as a loss leader to sustain future growth. Get clarity on what success looks like and get sign off from all key stakeholders. The requirements gathering phase is often the most complex.

Have a Plan – Agreement

The world of project management is often the thorn in the sides of creatives, but without project plans designers would never truly understand the constraints / limitations of a project. Design is hard, and the best designers can create meaningful experiences while considering many business, technological and consumer constraints. Your project plan / charter is your agreement on what you are going to create. Review these and physically sign these off in your stakeholder meetings.

Price Accordingly

Design has a lot of overhead. Design project consider resources / talent, computers, software, specialized equipment, locations, releases, fees, dues, consumables, printing, typefaces, stock art, building leases, insurance, etc. The number one mistake is small companies or freelancers charge too little for their services. Use your experience, leverage your project plan and provide clear, ethical estimates.

Understand the Competition

Understanding where the product your creating sits relative to another product or service is critical to the success. Remember to complete a heuristic analysis, where you consider, navigation, links and labels, readability, learnability, search engine results, performance, content, and relevance. In addition you can provide traditional SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats.) remember the key to everything is understand the opportunity. I am a big fan of perceptual mapping when it comes to identifying opportunities.

Understand the Business Model

Also understanding which business model your using is important. Are you bringing new products to new consumers (pioneering) or bringing a new product to existing consumers (sustaining) or and existing product to new consumers (sustaining) or an existing product to existing users (saturating.) This is usually a collaborative effort between the business and consumer insight teams.

Have Clear Functional Specifications – Leverage Analytics

Understand what things the user will be able to do. Then understand which mediums, platforms, and technologies you want to use. This includes target resolutions, frame rates, performance, browser compatibility etc. Use Google Analytics or other performance tracking software to validate design solutions.

C – Understand your Creative Capacity

Understand Composition Principles

These rules have been used by photographers and architects for years.

The Rule of Thirds.

The rule states that an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections.

image on the left is uncropped, image on right is cropped using intersection point as reference

The Golden Ratio

Throughout history, the ratio for length to width of rectangles of 1.61803 39887 49894 84820 has been considered the most pleasing to the eye. This ratio was named the golden ratio by the Greeks. In the world of mathematics, the numeric value is called “phi”, named for the Greek sculptor Phidias. The space between the collumns form golden rectangles. There are golden rectangles throughout this structure which is found in Athens, Greece. The golden ratio, also known as the divine proportion, golden mean, or golden section, is a number often encountered when taking the ratios of distances in simple geometric figures such as the pentagon, pentagram, decagon and dodecahedron.

Fibonacci sequence.

Has been an inspiration in design and mathematics. You will find it in may classic design pieces. The easiest explanation is that the next number in the sequence is reached by adding the previous 2 (starting with 0 and 1). Here is a small sample of the Fibonacci sequence so you can see how that works. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21… and so on. The easiest way to work with the concept of the Fibonacci sequence is actually by using the Golden Ratio because the higher the Fibonacci sequence gets the closer it’s numbers get to the Golden Ratio. Another benefit to using the Golden Ratio as opposed to the Fibonacci sequence is that the Golden Ratio can be applied to any number and many times in design we are stuck with certain dimensions. For instance we may be designing for an 800×600 display and we want to make our layout work with the Golden Ratio. We would simply multiply 800 x .6180339887 and come up with 494.

Swiss Grid Systems

Grid systems are the foundation of a interactive designers layout for a website, kiosk or other interface based system. Originally made famous by Josef Müller-Brockmann. A Swiss graphic designer and teacher who studied architecture, design and history of art at and had a studio specialising in graphic design, exhibition design and photography. This style in art, architecture and culture became an ‘international’ style after 1950’s and it was produced by artists all around the globe. It is a grid based layout that looks at uniformity and geometry (experiment and explore with combinations of geometric shapes, contrast, and striking abstract visuals.) A composition that uses a grid system considers whitespace and typography. Text based compositions are allowed to breath and work seamlessly with photographs and layers of visuals to create powerful messages. To learn more about Swiss Style Graphic Design, check out this great article from Smashing Magazine

Understand Interface Principles

The interface is the layer between the user and the system.The interaction designer determines how the interface will work. The interface designer determines how the interface will look, feel and respond.

Affordances

Affordances are possible actions that are easily perceivable by the user. Shape, contrast and visual cues communicate what is possible within the interface and world (system.)

Conventions

Conventions utilize what users already understand this also supports affordance. A convention is a constraint in that it prohibits some activities and encourages others.

Feedback

Feedback lets the user know what just happened, or that something is possible. Proper feedback is critical when providing rewarding experiences. Feedback considers your content inventory for buttons and interactive elements. There are usually- active, inactive, hover (on rollover,) visited states. Designers often overlook how much feedback influences an experience.

Fitts Law

Is a model of human movement in human–computer interaction and ergonomics that predicts that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the distance to and the size of the target. Fitts’s law is used to model the act of pointing, either by physically touching an object with a hand or finger, or virtually, by pointing to an object on a computer monitor using a pointing device. It was proposed by Paul Fitts in 1954.

Screens of Information

Understand the mediums where the content will be displayed and which information is most important

Wayfinding

Wayfinding is how users know where they are, where they can go,and how to get there. Good wayfinding makes the interface more usable.

CTA – Calls to Action

A Call To Action is an element of the interface that tries to entice the user to do something such as register purchase, or click on an item.