
How we really use the web (2000) - Mahn
http://www.sensible.com/chapter.html
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solve
The huge problem is that outsourced designers almost never "own" the product
-- compensation is almost never structured based on long-term conversion rates
or future value that the website earns. Even if they do partially own the
future results, their up-front payment is far more compelling from their
perspective. They have a pre-agreed price, and then they just optimize for
portfolio beauty so that they can up their prices on other future projects.

The whole designer outsourcing structure has terribly aligned incentives.
You'd be surprised at the percentage of professional designers that have
absolutely no clue about conversion optimization [edit: I mean designing for
optimum conversions], for the business they're in it's "beauty" above all.

~~~
ThomPete
While that is true it's not really the designers job to have a clue about
conversion optimization. If they do more power to them, the same can be said
about knowing about programming, copyright etc. but it's not what their skills
are all about (and you wouldn't want it to be either)

I would claim that it's a matter of using designers the right way.

What they can do is to react to feedback and provide you with the opportunity
to try out different directions.

If you are really into A/B testing etc. it's fairly easy to get the designer
to try out different things.

Also a little trick which is actually what designers normally kobe with really
well.

Set limitations that the need to adhere to. For instance:

\- Page may not be bigger than 400kb \- Font has to be available from google
fonts and so on.

That way you have set some expectations that the designer must adhere to and
you are in a much better position to have a conversation with them.

~~~
solve
I'm not at all talking about minor A/B experiments after the design is built.
I'm not talking about a process at all. Instead I'm talking about a goal.

I'm talking about, from the start, building with the goal of maximum
conversions (or whatever primary end-metric the business uses) versus building
with the goal of maximum portfolio beauty.

Design often massively affects conversion rates, as I'm sure you know. Saying
that one's job isn't to do what's best for the company, and you can totally
disregard what the company's overall goal is? I'm sure whoever's running the
business will find that perspective interesting, no matter what industry
you're working in.

I've never worked as a designer though, so I'm interested to learn more about
this.

~~~
ThomPete
Design affects conversion rate but the thing to understand is that you rarely
know what it is that affect it before you actually test it.

There is an almost infinite amount of space between something completely
useless and something purely functional and there is an almost as big amount
of factors that affect how it converts many of them outside the scope of the
design.

The exact same basic bootstrap theme will convert really well for some and
horribly for others and have nothing different between them than the product
and the images.

And so to repeat (sorry) you need to understand how to use the designer for
the right things. It's not their job nor should it be to create the optimal
design up front. It's their job to give you a good starting point and to
achieve that is fairly simple as long as you set some limitations up for them.

You could might as well require of the developer to have great aesthetic sense
or the marketing guys to understand why a call to action on a page require a
certain amount of "white space" to make it stand out. If they do it's great
but there are just far between them.

Otherwise there are already a bunch of tried and true templates out there you
can just buy and that is what many do.

I agree that there are some designers who are purely aesthetic but sometimes
that actually is a force that if you understand how to use that skill you can
create something truly amazing.

Of course good designers have some sense of what is a good basic structur, but
just expecting a designer to somehow both be a marketing expert, seo expert,
analytics guy etc up front is a tad too demanding IMO.

~~~
solve
Interesting. Thank you for sharing.

"You could might as well require of the developer to have great aesthetic
sense" \- Yes, the full-stack-developer trend is exactly that. I do think that
is a great idea in general.

Just a side note: In all my years of startups and day jobs, I've always found
that if someone ever says "not my job" = it's an extremely bad sign for the
business. Perhaps someone might say, "doing X instead is better for the
company." But simply framing it as "not my job" \- shows a lot about the
deeper thinking that the person is having.

~~~
ThomPete
I agree.

And about the "not my job" part. This is definitely a problem, especially in a
startup where everyone basically have to be jack of all trades.

But as a company grow it's important to find a way to utilize each others
skills in such a manner that things actually get build and the
responsibilities are clear.

Often you end up realizing that what one person did half-hearted because they
also have other obligations, could actually benefit from having someone only
doing that also financially.

------
JTon
> We don’t read pages. We scan them.

Had a good chuckle as I scanned to this headline. For me at least, it's very
true

~~~
robbyking
It's amazing that magazine layout designers did as well as they did
considering they didn't have a measurable fraction of the data we have now on
users' reading habits. With the (ever evolving) data we now have from eye
tracking tests in usability labs, modern designers have an amazing advantage
when it comes to creating intuitive web pages and applications.

The downside, though, is so much of the web has become homogenous. It feels
like every start up has an out-of-the-box website build with bootstrap,
complete with a full-width parallax header image and liberal use of Helvetica
Neue.

~~~
emodendroket
> The downside, though, is so much of the web has become homogenous. It feels
> like every start up has an out-of-the-box website build with bootstrap,
> complete with a full-width parallax header image and liberal use of
> Helvetica Neue.

Really, that's a win in the eyes of most users, who are more interested in
easily finding what they were looking for than whizz-bang features.

------
emodendroket
I always get a laugh when people look at these articles and say "Oh, that's
old. Things are totally different now." And then they find out the hard way
that, actually, people change much more slowly than computers do.

