Over the past few months, we’ve been asking ourselves some hard questions regarding how we’re running our agency. One of the biggest challenges we’ve experienced has always been managing project timelines. When we analyzed our custom-designed website projects, we found most took in the neighborhood of 250 hours. Assuming that time is split between a project manager, a designer and a developer, we theoretically should be able to push these projects out in roughly six weeks. Yet, we constantly saw projects taking 12, 18 to even 24 weeks.

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It was a massively frustrating experience for our clients and us. Digging deeper, we found the primary cause of these delays was always one of the following:

  • Clients wanting to go ‘back to the drawing board’ on design decisions that were made earlier in the design process.
  • Getting feedback from too many sources (other than the actual user) and experiencing the ‘design by committee’ effect.
  • Clients ‘sweating the small stuff’ and obsessing with small tweaks that aren’t core to the user experience.

Noting this, we knew we had to make some changes. We needed to focus on speed without compromising quality. So we looked at how we executed projects and adjusted our process from design based on making assumptions to design based on testing assumptions. Specifically, we learned four lessons that have become the core of our design process:

Benchmark Your Success

Before you can determine whether a new design is successful, it’s critical that you define success. In the case of SaaS and E-Commerce, success equals shopper conversion. Although many platforms, such as Shopify, have analytics baked into their features, implementing more advanced analytic tools ensures you’re measuring conversion correctly and completely. Luckily, tools such as Google Analytics and MixPanel make this implementation relatively painless. Once configured, you’re able to not only accurately measure conversion rates and, therefore, benchmark success, but also gain additional insights that can drive design strategy. Particularly, we like to analyze the existing paths/funnels that customers are using to discover and purchase products. We’ll often re-design a website around one or two existing funnels our clients might not have even known existed.

Speak to Your (Prospective) Customers

An often-overlooked source of design inspiration, and a way to cut through broad assumptions, is to speak directly with your customers. One tricky aspect, however, is the bias that is often inherent in interviewing existing customers who have purchased your product or service. When presenting new design ideas or asking questions relative to your website, they’re not going to provide the same level of feedback a prospective customer, who’s in the middle of the buying process, might offer. One tool we’re experimenting with to capture real (and often brutal) feedback from prospective customers is Qualaroo. Qualaroo lets you prompt visitors with a brief one-question ‘survey’ to gain insight on how you might be able to better serve their buying process. Naturally these insights provide a huge leg-up in your design process and assumptions.

Prioritize Your Work

One thing that we used to get caught up on with was on designing ‘too much.’ Building 1000+ page websites, you find yourself designing dozens of templates. When we actually took the time to review the analytics for these websites, however, we found customers spent around 80% of their time on only 20% of the pages (Pareto Principle). When we dug into these 20% of pages, we realized we could cut our design work from dozens of templates to a handful that truly impacted the customer experience. We’ve now started to ruthlessly prioritize the scope of any project to ensure we’re launching the least amount necessary to create the greatest impact.

Test Your Assumptions

With some of our larger projects, it wasn’t until after we’d gone through the entire design process, and finished all of the backend development, that we’d be able to finally receive customer feedback on the new website. This means we were months into a project before we knew whether our assumptions around our customers were accurate. We’ve now started ‘testing’ our assumptions during the design process by utilizing A/B testing tools such as Optimizely to launch individual variations of ‘core’ templates we identified having the most impact on experience. This allows us to test a new homepage idea to ensure it produces the results we expect before officially launching.

Combining all of the strategies above, we’ve been able to cut the design/development cycle done from months to weeks on a number of projects while increasing the effectiveness of our designs. By involving customers in the process, prioritizing the work you do, and testing all of your assumptions, you too can design like a hare!