Today my partner in crime is not Kathleen, our fearless CEO. We have a special guest star, five certification HubSpot queen and our Art Director, Jessie-Lee Nichols.
In April, Jessie-Lee will be coming up on five whole years with us, which is a long time. Her background is in graphic design, and she's known she wanted to be a graphic designer since she was 12 years old, when she became involved with her father's own website redesign process.
I think that one of Jesse-Lee's mantras that I've always heard her say since she joined Quintain was that, "You were going to rid the world of ugly websites one site at a time." I love the ambition there. And you know what? We have seventy-five down and millions more to go.
Let's talk about next year.
GROWTH-DRIVEN DESIGN
Jessie-Lee has been pounding the Growth-driven design drum which will take us on a little bit of a tangent here.
She explains that it's new for the marketing world. We've been explaining this concept to a lot of our "techie" clients, those guys that are really ingrained in IT. This is not a new concept to them. It really follows along with agile, working on a point system, against the list and things like that.
With traditional web design, you say, "Okay. My websites tired. It's been eighteen months, or two years since I've redesigned it. I'm going to put this RFP out there or find a company or something to get somebody to redo it." Then you'll spend anywhere from three to six months redoing your website tirelessly. You're looking at button colors. You're looking at fonts. Is it evoking the right tone?
All of this nonsense, and what do you do? Eighteen months later you're doing it again. It's this painful, terrible process for most everyone involved.
Growth-driven design flips that dynamic. When you do traditional web design, you're sitting with your designer, your developer, your marketing company and you're making all these assumptions. You're saying, "I think visitors are going to go down this path. They're really going to click on this color as opposed to that color, and we need to make all these changes." Growth-driven design allows the website to do all of that assuming and thinking for you.
Because you're designing a very, very quick website that usually gets launched anywhere from thirty to sixty days. A minimum viable product is the official term for it. Something that you can put out there that's going to represent you, but it might not have every single bell and whistle might desire in a website.
Month over month you'll be working against a long wishlist you will have created with your marketing team. It'll probably be anywhere from 50 to 150 items. Pie in the sky stuff, all the way down to, "We really need to change the image behind our footer." It could be simple. It could be complex.
You choose from one of those wishlist items and from there you tackle that over the course of a month, over the course of two months. You decide a measurable time period for how long you're going to test a hypothesis that you're going to make. You're going to say, "I think that our conversions are going to be increased by 50 percent if we change all buttons on forms to blue instead of orange."
You then give it the time for users to test it out and after that particular period of time is up – say, 30 days. You take a look at your analytics and you see what happens. Was your prediction correct? I will say it's a little like a seventh grade science class, but I think that makes it fun.
I love the idea of routing the decision making process in factual data. One of the things that is so powerful about inbound marketing is all of the data that's available. What you can learn from visitors, contacts, leads, qualified leads, etc., as they go through their buying journey.
Your website is there to educate, to help you get found, to solve problems. It's your best sales person.
"YOUR WEBSITE IS THERE TO EDUCATE, TO HELP YOU GET FOUND, TO SOLVE PROBLEMS. IT'S YOUR BEST SALES PERSON."
Okay. Let's talk about 2016. What's on the horizon?
MORE OF THE SAME
According to Jessie-Lee, 2016 is going to be a lot of the same, but doing it a little bit better, with more and more people hopping on board. For example, responsive web design. Your site has to be responsive. Google told you your site has to be responsive last April. ("Mobilegeddon," as some called it.) They put it out there and said, "You will be penalized if you don't have a responsive site."
Just because your site pops up on your phone does not mean it's responsive. If you can access your website and have a consistent experience from desktop, to tablet, to mobile phone without pinching the screen, that's when you have a responsive website. Jessie-Lee feels like she debunks that myth all day.
However, Google has a tool you can use to determine whether or not your site is responsive in the way it needs to be.
MORE FLAT DESIGN
Next, Jessie-Lee says we're going to be seeing more flat design. You've probably noticed most sites on the web are starting to all look the same – she tells us why. There's a reason behind this movement toward this uniformity of flat design, and Jessie-Lee says that's a good thing.
Flat design goes hand-in-hand with the responsive sites, because it works so much better on this mobile phone. You're designing with a mobile-first mentality. Somebody is more likely to access your website on the phone than they are on the desktop. You have to make sure you're designing for that. It doesn't sound like rocket science, but you have to take into consideration the button that says, "Download now or contact us."
Is your thumb able to really press that and press it without pinching or scrolling or hitting another button beside it? Flat design addresses this. Not only are the files much less clunky with flat design, because you're not having to load all of these styles in your cascading style sheets, it's just there. It works. It loads quickly which is exactly what you want on mobile.
But is flat design the graphic how something looks or is it a way that it's coated or written?
Jessie-Lee says both.
For instance, if you create a button that looks 3-D, you will need to add in multiple lines of style code as opposed to just one background. It has to load more information to develop that 3-D style as opposed to just that flat button.
So somebody who is now talking to a company about updating their website, a good question for them to ask would be, "Are you going to propose a flat design for my site?"
THE RISE OF THE USER INTERFACE
Finally, the user interface is going to become front and center. That's when we start to see the Internet starting to look the same. You go from one website to the other and you're like, "Okay, I'm starting to understand this layout. We have a logo on the left. We have a menu on the right. We have a large image and then we might have three boxes underneath that. The homepage is really, really long. There's a reason all sites are starting to look the same because you expect them to look the same. You use Facebook. You use Amazon. They all have very, very similar elements to one another. When those elements aren't in sync you're like, "Wow, this is different."
One of the things that I try to do when I develop and design websites is I try to make sure that the user doesn't have to think. When the user has to think about what they're doing, that's when you've gone totally AWOL.
Standing out isn't as important as solving problems by offering up information. You can stand out in different ways, but having this extraordinary design to your homepage, just going to confuse people. They expect the menu to be in the same spot. They expect to see certain things. They expect to see the contact bar all the way to the right every single time. They don't want to see that on the left. You want to make sure that your website's providing a consistent experience.
Not only across your entire site, but a consistent experience to, dare I say it, that of your competitors, as well as other websites they use all the time. Look at the big monster, giant sites like Facebook, like Apple, like Pinterest. They will help give you some in sight as to, "Okay. These are the types of things that these guys are trending, that they're doing. I need to emulate that to some respect."
I think another thing to mention too are the "hamburger" menus – those three little lines you see in the upper right-hand corner of websites. Since everybody is accessing things on mobile now, I've been seeing those more and more on desktop. Jessie-Lee hasn't taken the leap to try it on a desktop site yet, but thinks it would be interesting. People understand what that is. They don't need to necessarily need to have the entire menu all the way across.
In terms of standing out and being different, if you choose a really huge hero image, one that is largely colorful, beautiful, this massive visual experience, you don't want it cluttered by things like a crazy logo and a huge menu over the top. Use the hamburger. Have a full screen menu pop up when you hit the hamburger.
Bottom line, the internet's starting to look the same. There are some little things you can do with nods and respects to those things that are starting to look the same. You shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel when you redo your website. That's really going against the grain and not in a good way.
JESSIE-LEE'S BIGGEST PET PEEVE? "ABOVE THE FOLD..."
Another big sticking point with Jessie-Lee is the long scroll homepage. One of her biggest pet peeves in web design is a common phrase you've probably heard of: "Above the fold."
Websites are living, breathing things, especially with the onset of really using your mobile device. Having those responsive experiences with the website, you scroll. Look at the way you use Facebook. Not to bring it up again, but you scroll.
In fact, there is no such thing as having a page that scrolls too much. Of course, you have to be reasonable to a certain point. Are you going to sit there and scroll for two hours before you get to what you need? No. But one could reasonably sit on Facebook, continue to scroll and see new information.
If you're trying to design with your website above the fold, you're going to be killing yourself because above the fold on your computer looks different than above the fold on my computer, which looks different on your phone, compared to my huge iPhone, compared to your iPad mini, compared to mine.
So let go of the phrase, "above the fold." It's for print design, for print design only. It's to sell newspapers. And you're not trying to sell your website like a newspaper.
WHAT ABOUT GOOGLE?
Here is my last question to Jessie-Lee as we wrap up, "If you could design the Google homepage what would you do?"
Her answer? She'd take away everything but the search bar. She'd go totally minimalist on this one because of all the points we've talked about today. The fact that we're trying to get rid of the clutter and really let those consistent experiences break through. It's Google. You know what to do. It's just like when Starbucks reinvented their last logo. They removed the words, "Starbucks Coffee." You still know that, that green siren is the Starbucks siren.
WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU
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If you DO tweet us using #hesaidshesaidpodast, there's a special gift in it for you. We've got some new SWAG in at the office, and we'll send some to you if you tweet us! (And if you want to get in touch with Jessie-Lee, you can find her on Twitter at @jhyphenl.)
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