Designing a site as a consulting service

Two and a half years ago, habrovchan had to be convinced of the need for design . Today, Yandex’s search results for the “site design” request contain more than a hundred thousand pages (unfortunately, not always of good quality). This indicates a consensus in the industry - website design is necessary.

In the new article we want to dispel a very stable and popular misconception: “the result of the design is a document or a prototype” . Such a thought, the default stitched in the heads of all clients and almost all performers, results in serious financial losses.

This is how the design of the good old Wikipedia:

Design - the activity of a person or organization to create a project, that is, a prototype , a prototype of the intended or possible object, state; a set of documentation intended for creating a specific object, its operation, repair and liquidation, as well as for checking or reproducing the intermediate and final decisions on the basis of which this object was developed.

That is, shifting this definition to the development of sites, everyone imagines something like this (regardless of how the design process itself is organized and what stages it consists of).
In this picture, the most important are usually the intermediate and final data and documents: the results of collecting information about the target audience, the results of the research of competitors, vision, design task, functional requirements, sketches, prototype, and so on.

We believe that the most important thing in this picture is the arrows for transitions from document to document . And that's why.
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Phased uncertainty reduction

Let us recall the situation when an ordinary client comes to an ordinary executor and asks for a commercial offer. The client in such a situation has a very vague idea of ​​the future site (sometimes randomly formalized into a kind of technical assignment or shoved into the Procrustean bed of the agency brief).

A quality design process gradually reduces uncertainty about a future project.



Why step by step? Therefore, this is an engineering process based on hypotheses regarding the behavior of the target audience. He needs to search for insights, put forward hypotheses and confirm or refute them.

When a client sees the brief on a project sale, and then an interactive prototype after two weeks of silence, he sees just such a picture.



The reaction is obvious and predictable. The prototype is so at odds with its initial vague idea that at best, he zadolbaet performer questions. At worst, it will start moving blocks.

Consequently, the design process should be a consistent refinement of the structure and appearance of the future site , based on the nomination and testing of hypotheses.

In the minds of the entire project team

Returning to the illustration with an owl, we see an obvious fact - “a consistent refinement of the structure and appearance of the future site” is not enough to produce only in the head of the designer (analyst, manager, and so on). This process should occur in the head of the customer.

To be more precise, this process should take place concurrently and simultaneously in the heads of all the participants in the project team on both sides.

Only in this case the risks of major changes are minimized, for example, at the design stage. The sad situation is familiar when the layout of the main one goes to the director, who last participated in the project when signing the contract, and it turns out that he didn’t even see the prototype, although his visa is on the prototype? This is what happens when the result of the design is a document, and not a change in the consciousness of the project team.

So, we offer a new definition of website design.

Website design is a consulting service for creating an image of a future website, the end result of which is the same clarification of the purpose, tasks, structure, functionality, usage scenarios and site tectonics in the minds of the entire project team .

What does this mean for customers and performers?

If you are a customer:

• The artist must not require documents, pictures and prototypes, but explanations.
  How will the representatives of the target groups behave and why?
  Why is this functionality needed, but this is not?
  How were the hypotheses tested?
  What will we do if in the process of exploitation it turns out that some hypotheses are wrong?
• Your company should immerse in the design process very deeply.
  You can not give this process at the mercy of the manager with low qualifications.
  You can not let the designers in the "free swimming".
  You can not demand results from contractors, if you yourself do not know with whom, what and why you are going to talk.
• You must include in the process all those interested in the project (with varying degrees of involvement).
  If a project involves any service, its manager must understand the meaning and necessity of the design. He must coordinate those components of the project that affect his service, or at least be informed of the decisions taken.

If you are a performer:

• You need to work out customer expectations before starting the design.
  Ideally, he should be aware of the points for the customer described above. If a client expects to get “wow, this is exactly what I wanted” and without taking part in the process at all, you are incredibly at risk.
• You must be ready to provide a consulting service.
  You need to learn with the help of forceps to extract information from the client, clarify the breakdown of forces in the company (if there is more than one stakeholder), work through objections, prove your point of view and form an image of an expert in the eyes of the client.
  "In the work of swift, I ask a few questions" - this can not apply to the design.
• Design can not be cheap or free.
  “Development of an interactive prototype: free of charge when ordering development” - are you kidding or are you a young freelancer ?!
  Depending on the process, taking into account all negotiations with the client (which constitute a large part of the labor intensity), designing a site from scratch cannot take less than 40-60 hours.
  Even at the cost of an hour for a client about 1000 rubles (and this is below the market average), the cost of design is about 50,000 rubles.

Let's make Runet more convenient for end users and site visitors together. Technical tasks and prototypes alone do not solve this problem. Web studios and agencies must be willing to teach, and clients must learn.