Having done the initial interview with the client and having received some basic information, we are already on a journey of discovery, ie gathering important information highly relevant to our project. It is good to know that at this very moment, many a less experienced designer starts to have the nagging feeling that they are on thin ice, that they understand nothing, and that they are sinking into a quagmire of complex terms and principles of an alien discipline. In front of us, a huge landscape opens up of a specialism we haven’t the faintest idea about. We may feel overwhelmed by unknown notions, standards, and processes that our client is an expert at. We stare at them, uncomprehending, and the more we read up on the discipline in question, the stronger the feeling that we do not understand a single word becomes; brain fog sets in, and the more we try to grasp and fathom the discipline’s depths, the less we actually understand.
Huge mistake, of course. A designer cannot become expert at each of their client’s disciplines. We cannot, within a week or a month, become adept at plastic surgery, applied geochemistry, or social science, or gain a deep insight into meat production or – to return to our favourite example– ball bearings business. With time, however, we find we do not actually need to do or know all this, either. There is no need whatsoever to know the details and murky corners of the client’s trade. We just need to grasp the fundamental connections and principles of its operations and link them to some general patterns. A company’s showcase for the public or professionals, an e-shop for end customers, a public institution’s website, a B2B sales tool, a virtual press room, a virtual art exhibition, etc. There is only a rather limited array of basic categories, and an experienced designer is able to quickly pinpoint the correct one and link the project up with the appropriate tried and trusted template.
When you find yourself getting too deep into the client’s business, but your understanding of it is dissipating, you are doing it wrong. You should have a general grasp of it, keep your distance, and look for suitable parallels.
A suitably detached view and distance and understanding which information is important for the creation of a functional website and which information can be ignored are the key skills of a professional designer. The minute we delve too deep into the client’s business and start grappling with terminology, working procedures, and business relationships, it is high time we give up and move on. Our goal is to have a background of general, not too specialized, knowledge. And if we from time to time feel that we are unable to wrap our head around a certain sub-discipline or specific topic, and feel that it might somehow be relevant to our work and impact on its results, we should listen to an expert – be it someone from the client’s company or a hired consultant – who will explain it plainly, in lay terms. But experience shows that such situations are actually few and far between, and normally we can make do without. A designer’s distance and detachment can often completely gloss over the differences between selling contact lenses and bananas, between presenting chicken keeping and machine fitting, between the specifics of trading wool yarn and ball bearings. Two similar categories usually have a lot more in common than different between them.
To do a good job designing a well-functioning website with clear navigation that ideally supports its intended use-case scenarios and fulfils the client’s business objectives, we usually do not need to know in detail the technical specifics of the target discipline. That the specifications of Product A must be presented very differently for end users and B2B partners, that an insurance company representative must proceed completely differently when filling out Form PT1660 than when filling out Form W-91, that heavy load ball bearings KL3001 are sold in an entirely different regime than miniature ball bearings KL030x – ultimately these are just technical details, which we can iron out with the client later on, and which only have a negligible impact on the overall design (if it is bigger, this is usually resolved after the first consultation with the client). If, while researching, we come across some less comprehensible or more complex area, why not instead use a placeholder that makes sense to us – this is where lawyers will define the precise procedure for signing a contract; this is where a “wizard” for selecting ball bearing parameters, which we will create having consulted experts, will be; “technobabble mumbo jumbo” goes here. Let’s make peace with the fact that because of one job, we cannot (and nor do we want to!) become expert at something that takes years of study to get into, and an entire life’s career to master. That is nonsense.
Our advantage and our added value lies in the ability to find the appropriate distance and a wider perspective, to look at the client’s peculiar discipline from another angle, to uncover general principles within it, and to apply to it universally valid laws. Now we must find and gather information that is general and universally valid, as opposed to specific and unique. Regardless of the specific business or discipline, we must define our target audience as precisely as possible, recognize what the unique thing the client does is and how they differ from competition, get an idea of the market… And with this information put together a working profile of the client, their competitors, and their target audience, and use this to correctly define the goals the website should fulfil, to implement a business model, and finally to design a website that will optimally fulfil these goals, and at the same time will in some attractive way give way to the needs of the client’s target audience.
