“I’m wearing three hats right now, so bear with me,” I said, laughing. “Brand strategist, Content strategist and Information Architect. No wait – four hats – SEO strategist too.” My client laughed too. “I know the feeling. You’ve got as many personalities as I do now.”
We were having a long conversation about the Home page strategy for the client company’s website redesign. The core redesign team is small – two Marketing executives on the client side and a creative director, project manager and me on the consultancy side. It’s Winter break, though, so today it’s just me and the Marketing director, trying to make strategy out of a lot of unknowns. What we know for sure is that we have a deadline.
And there are a lot of disperate issues on the table. Should the Promo A be 2/3 or full-width? How many Promo B’s do they really need? Which are the important calls-to-action from the Home page? What is the right brand positioning statement for the Home page? How to maintain keyword density and still simplify the Home page content?
My client is playing the role of herself and her colleague, and I’ve now morphed into multiple people, looking at the same table from four different seats.
I plunge in.
“’Quality’ and ‘Global’ are two important words for the company from a Brand strategy perspective,” I offer. “I’d like to figure out a way to work them into either your first navigation link or the H1 header strategy. The SEO strategist likes that idea too but wants to make sure we know it will impact our existing keyword strategy. You guys are going to need to change it up, but we already know that.”
Reading that now, I realize I may have sounded slightly lunatic, but my client either didn’t notice or was actually listening to what I was saying and didn’t care that I was talking about another one of my “personalities” in the third-person.
More likely, with a pile of conflicting feedback from her colleague to sort through, she was looking to me to provide structure to the process, and was waiting patiently for that to happen.
While the timeline for this redesign was compressed, my client – who was relatively new in her current position – had not yet been responsible for helming a structured web design process, even though as a savvy Marketer, she knew they needed one. There simply weren’t enough hours in the schedule for heavy documentation, and no developers to collaborate in an Agile process, so when I was awarded the project, I went into flexibility-mode and pulled a few tried-and-true tools out of my UX toolkit. I needed to create an abbreviated user-centered design process tailored to the project schedule & budget. In short order I had conducted Stakeholder Interviews, using the results of those to put together User Personas, Scenarios and a new conceptual Organizational Model to help structure our IA strategy. Organic user-centered UX strategy is in the building.
I had presented three different Conceptual Wireframe directions that I created based on the foundational documents, and today we grabbed some time out of the end-of-year air to sort through conflicting and missing feedback. My goal was to arrive at agreement over a direction that would be used as a basis to develop the IA for rest of the site, and fast. Now what to do about the multiple personalities sitting at the table, vying for our limited attention?
“We’ll revisit the Brand strategy when we take a deeper dive into copy development. I want to put aside the Content strategy of the Home page for the time being, because what we decide to do with our Promo A will not impact the new site architecture. Let’s leave that open for conversation with the rest of the team and concentrate on what we like about the different proposed directions for the IA.”
I’ve acknowledged the problem: too many issues that the two of us can’t resolve alone a few days before the New Year.
I’ve named them: Branding, Content, SEO, IA; naming takes away their power to confuse and defocus.
I’ve refocused the conversation: get sign-off on the proposed IA structure.
We were able to wrap up within ten minutes, with sign-off on what I felt was the right direction for the company (a more disciplined Navigation, narrow and deep, and the promise of a clean, simplified Home page).
Bringing decisiveness and calm with me into the New Year feels like exactly what the moment needed.
Happy 2011.
