#42: Surviving the Dreaded Website Redesign

Hey everybody, you’re listening to the drunken UX podcast. This is episode number 42. Or we’re going to be talking about surviving your own little special corner of website redesign. Hell, I’m your host, Michael Fienen.

I’m doing all right this evening. It’s we’re feeling good. We’re feeling spicy. I’m a spicy boy.

I were supposed to come up with something like super clever for that.

That is six more hours than you needed for the number so

Folks, if you like other witty things, be sure run by our sponsors over at New cloud.com slash drunken UX. You can check them out for all your mapping needs, interactive maps, map illustrations, printed maps, all of those kinds of things. Check them out. Let them know that we sent you over so they have fun with us.

I am drinking cider boys. This is the Mad bark. I am taking a different tack tonight. So this is the apple cinnamon hard cider is kind of like almost like a an apple cobbler. Kind of no interesting. It’s it’s pretty sweet. But it’s not super sugary. Which is nice because I’ve had some of these before like or if you’ve ever had a like I like what is it? Not your dad’s root beer or something like that.

it’s good. Okay, it’s root Berry and sweet. But there’s so much sugar in it. It literally a bottle of it makes my muscles hurt. There’s so much sugar in it. What’s

That the generic stuff is just filler that it’s it’s just alcohol.

alcohol. Yes.

I like me some cracking so I’ll try that up. These are nice though. They’re like say they’re easy drinking. They’re very simple. From like an ingredient standpoint. And when I because I the first time I had one, I’m like, oh god, I’m going to pay for this later. I tasted how sweet it was. And I was like, man, there’s a ton of sugar in this. And I mean there is but it’s not just like corn syrup, sugar.

Maybe not the spirit they’re going for but

It’s late. What do you got over there? I’ve got a

Did you muddle have like a nice fresh basil leaf into it?

that let me know how it is then I won’t ruin mine. If folks if you want to know more about what we’re drinking, what we’re doing, where we are where we go. And be sure to follow us on all of the social media wherever you want to track us down. We are on Twitter and Facebook at slash drunk. And you can also hit us up on Instagram at slash drunken UX podcast. You can chat with us anywhere you want to but mostly just from Slack, that’s drunken ux.com slash slack and it will get you right into our channel. And you can give us topic suggestions, drink suggestions,

So we have been very, very susceptible suggestion on this show when it comes to like what we’re drinking. So I think that’s fair. In fact, we haven’t had a Vesper Martini in a while. So I’m have to cue that back up.

you can’t get a little a blank.

I can’t find Lily block either. So yeah. So I want to talk first, before we jump into redesign stuff. There was a article that came across my radar, that was kind of cool. Because it gets into a couple things that we’ve talked about at length, one being CSS one being accessibility. And what this is, is over, it’s a Eric Eggert blog@yatil.net. And he was writing this article on the way you can use CSS content to do design that is also accessible. Hmm, this is a weird thing. So stick with me for a second because I had to kind of lay it out. I have to paint you a word picture as it were. Okay.

So you know, how you can use the content, property and CSS to append things to elements? Yeah, so yeah, for instance, if you are making a link that goes away, you can use after content to put in like a little SVG icon that, you know, like Wikipedia does with a little right arrow, right? Or a pin something like the letters PDF to a link, if it’s a download for a P

And people use CSS content for a lot of stuff, especially like presentational elements, like em dashes or rose

right. Yeah. So so we’ve got this, this property we can use for inserting content into into a layout. Now, for a long time, browsers had no clue what to do with that. That content wasn’t in the page, it wasn’t in the DOM. So browsers just ignored it, which means screen readers just skipped over it. I’m not great, especially like in the case of, you know, if you’ve got a link, and you’re attaching something, you know, like, say, external link or something next to it, that that would mean somebody using a screen reader would miss out on that, and wouldn’t know that extra context before they interacted with it.

But, of course, yes, you’re supposed to. But yeah, we know that. That doesn’t always happen, especially when you start getting into design. Right? This is where this starts to kind of take occur. People were using that to their advantage in typography. So for instance, have you seen like when people will have a sentence or a header or something like that? Yeah. And they will use before and after content in CSS to duplicate that text. And they’ll offset like up and left and down and right. And they’ll like, do like that sort of staggered font effect, you know?

Yeah. Like it or like a streaky font or something. Yeah, they’ll they’ll do that by layering after content after content after content, whatever. Cool. And it worked, because screen readers wouldn’t pay any attention to that, except now they do. Browsers started supporting that because they realized people were putting actual content in those things, because that’s what it’s there for. is they is the issue that the screen readers weren’t interpreting the CSS before. And now they are or is the issue that the screen meters haven’t changed, but the browsers are changing how they interpret it. That’s a good question that I think is maybe a distinction without a difference. Okay.

I think that if I remember the way it was phrased in the article, I think it was at least framed as the browser’s began interpreting the content into the the DOM tree that then gets sent to the screen readers. When that happens. I may be wrong about that. But like I said, I, it doesn’t exactly matter, because all that matters is the outcome was that, if you did and the example they use as a header with it duplicated once before, once after, which meant that header was in there three times. And so a screen reader would hit it, and it would read it three times as a result. Yeah, yeah. Even though the first two times were totally for nothing but presentation. They weren’t there to actually be content.

It’s Yeah, it’s done in CSS, but it is literally called content. Yeah. So I mean, it’s it is meant to display stuff. The Yeah, I think there is obviously an argument over Is that the right place to put genuine content versus like little bits of presents stuff? That’s certainly debatable. But they found a really novel workaround to this. Okay, that turns out to be super elegant. Okay. So remember, when we were talking about the future of CSS back in was that episode 39? Right, or forgotten? 4040? At 240 was a 40 4040. sounds right. So if you go back and listen to that episode, we talked a little bit about CSS functions, and how we have a lot of them already, people just don’t use them a lot. Right? There’s a function called attribute. ATR. Okay. And what it does is it will get the value of an attribute and let you do something with it. Okay. So what they the solution that they found to this was, there is an aria attribute, Aria label.

a label on anything for the most part, anything at sports a title and has content inside of it, you can put an Oreo label in an Oreo label is read instead of the content that is inside of it. That’s right. It’s it is considered superior for the screen reader. So that if for some reason, you do need to give the screen reader more context, perhaps than what is, you know, maybe, like, if you’re using visual cues, for instance, you may translate those in the words for the label. But what they found was they could do their header, use the label attribute, which in this case, would just say the same thing as the content inside only once. Yeah, it wouldn’t matter, because the screen reader is going to read it the same way either way, but then they as the value for the content property, they just say, you know, attribute Are you label, and the fact that there was now before and after content, no longer matters, because our label takes over for all of rights, right? So now they took this, this thing that was broken, people were using to something that broke, you know, because it was, quote, unquote, fixed, you know, they fixed the bug, quote, unquote, to using another workaround to get the same effect. But now it’s all like, it’s more technically appropriate as a solution. Now,

yeah, they’re still using before and after. But it’s not read three times, because Aria label exists. Got it. And so that, that simple fact just means that the screen reader can look at it, and it sees, hey, we’ve got content with before and after. But we were also given an aria label. And we are told to trust the label above all else.

right? Because the label applies to the node that it is on.

right? Because then you get into the ARIA roles, right? Right, you’d have an aria role navigation, but you don’t have to say, Are your role navigation on the nav element because its intrinsic value you is navigation,

what’s a good it’s a good excuse for why learning accessibility can be quite useful to making you know, making things better and making your content better in the world run. So if you want to check out run by the blog, I will have a link to it in the show notes over at drunken UX com they’ve got that example there that I was talking about that walks you through it so if our explanation and description of it was not good enough, it’s a short read. It’s actually it’s very quick to get through and it makes a lot of sense when you see it done in space, especially the example like understanding why somebody would do the thing I was describing maybe hard gear, but when you see it in practice, it makes a lot of sense that sort of 70s effect of layered bond and you know when and you’ll think about you’ll see you’ve seen it other places and you’ll know you’ve seen another play that

I don’t even remember

and we forget them

can’t hurt to begin. Yeah, so this week we want to talk though at in depth about website redesigns. And this is a think of this like a fireside chat. I got I got my cider boys. Aaron’s got his basil Hayden. We’re going to sit back and dig into our wealth of experience here and talk to you about the redesigns we’ve gone through the challenges we faced and and what you should be kind of on the lookout for what warning signs there are something bad maybe about to happen. I see him counting on his fingers in the video go off way back. I remember in last season, when we talked about the first websites we built.

Okay, I’ll I’ll exclude those. I will go the same way. You did. Yeah, redesigns that I was involved with where I was paid to be involved. I think my number is eight. Yep. Now some of those were, you know, some of those were places I worked. Some of those I was hired as a consultant to drive forum. Some of those, you know, I’ve been working of a team. Some of them, I was the only person. So the some of these sites were small, some of them were big. There’s there, you know, I like the salt and pepper to my experience there because I feel like I really have kind of done everything as many wrong ways as you can possibly do it so that you know how to put it right. Next time.

you’re going back to like, 1.5 or so yeah,

You built the

Step one, you know, you’re on the road to a bad redesign. Your boss says, Hey, why don’t you just build the CMS?

So it’s, that’s a good chance to kind of start with I think, maybe the first step, which is, how, what are the bad reasons to jump into a redesign? And I think that’s, you know, let’s start with the bad so we can kind of work towards the good. And end on a high note.

That’s fair.

yeah, I’m not saying I’ve never done a project where I’ve been like, I’d love to learn that. Let’s build something in it. But I’ve done that. One of the big ones. And I’ve heard this myself, and I don’t love it is we don’t like it anymore. We don’t like our side anymore, or somebody doesn’t like our side anymore.

Yeah, the idea of somebody not liking something, that’s a bad reason to commit to a redesign, especially one person or one great, you know, depending on your site, and some of this, and I’ve been a warn folks now, like some of what we’re going to say tonight, is going to fluctuate and and I’ll try to, I will try to clarify what I’m saying something about, like a big site versus a small site. So for instance, if it’s your personal site, if it’s your blog, or your you know, any different, you don’t like it anymore, that yeah, that is very different from being at a company with a site that serves, you know, 10s of thousands of page views a day and has hundreds of thousands of users. And you know, as a marketing board that comes in as they don’t like it, that’s a very different thing.

Accountability helps, I’ll tell you that.

that goes all the way back to the print design days. Clearly, that goes that goes way back to all kinds of marketing when everybody needed to stand out. Everybody was trying to, you know, get that full page ad and, you know, whatever comic book was coming out next,

it doesn’t mean anything. It’s an empty state. And and that’s the same way with I don’t like it anymore. I don’t care if you don’t like it anymore. liking it isn’t a measurable quantity. And nor do I know what to do to make you like it now. Right? Right. If you say, hey, when you come to our site, you can’t even tell what our brand is. You know, you can’t, Jr, you know, you don’t? Yeah, our identity is hidden, because all we use are blacks and whites and grays. Sure, that I can work with. And that becomes justification to actually start redesigning something, because now I have an actionable thing. I understand the complaint. Yeah. And that can be hard.

But then that’s grounds for user testing. And then when they say that, you can ask them, What do you mean by x? Right? Because it’s still even then like, while it’s still indicative of a problem, you don’t know what the problem is, with those kinds of amorphous phrases. So anytime you hear those, those should be signals to say, well, let’s stop and identify what is the actual need? What is the actual issue?

Your website is not toothbrush?

Yeah, it’s Yeah, it’s not the kind of thing that yeah, it’s been six months, it’s been 3000 miles time to go.

if there is no clock, that’s the important part. Yeah. And with that, to what you were just saying to this idea of, like, you know, what does your business cycle on? Do your customers start to look around or whatever? Those are good questions. But the general idea of just, well, we just need to be competitive. Our websites not competitive anymore. Okay. Why? What does that mean? Why is it not competitive? What is it not doing? And then when you tell me what it’s not doing, then we can look at dressing that than that.

and you’ll find it rare that the reason like a conversion drops isn’t because your design stayed the same. That’s not how variables work. You know, if your design can get old and stale, that is absolutely true. But the idea that something that was generally effective, stops being effective is indicative of a different kind of problem.

damn it. I don’t have shots. I’m drinking beer tonight that must have to chug the rest of this. You realize how many bottles of this I’m going to go through? This has to do a step

Amazon’s in a weird case, too. And I that may even be worthy of its own episode at some point, because I’m sitting here thinking about it. And like, you know it for as much as you you will pull examples from a place like Amazon, and you know, that will talk here a little bit about the follow the leader mentality. The reality to me is that Amazon has up there above the rules, basically, like, yeah, and Google is another one, like some of these companies, they actually get to violate what we otherwise consider to be sort of the laws of UX.

ever Jenny generating more leads, though, is that that is a tactical chain. Yeah, that is a singular thing that you attack that you don’t resolve by redesigning your site, you deal with it by re architect in your lead generation process. And that may mean business logic changes as much as website changes.

yet. And anytime somebody brings up something like we need more traffic, that should be an immediate red flag under any kind of web project, because single dimension metrics are garbage, and they’re useless. If somebody says, We need more traffic, or we need to decrease bounce rate, or we need to improve the time on site, hmm, no, you don’t have to do any of those things.

single dimensionality is used a lot, because it’s so simple to convey. But it is ultimately a throwaway statistic. And the only way to make those those metrics valuable is to give them a second dimension, generally, compared to some sort of conversion, or some kind of goal that the website has. Because what you want to know is, what is our ratio of traffic to conversions, you know, are the people who spend more time on the site more likely to buy, you may discover that the people who come to your site and spend 30 seconds there are the most likely to buy your thing on impulse. And then if they spend eight minutes on your page, they never want to convert. So right higher time on site in that situation, turns out to be a tear, reason to do a redesign, because it’s counterintuitive to what you actually should be doing. Right? There’s an even then like some of that stuff, then you have asked that question of why why do you know people on this site shorter times by more,

You’re still using big words, you need to drink more of your bourbon. Don’t lose the dating, kind of fancy kind of person, are you Oh, it just

That’s like 18 syllables, man. Well, if you’ll allow me, I want to go on a rant. This, partly goes back to it. Talk, I get my god eight years ago. And I’m going to apologize in advance because I’m going to quote numbers from this talk that I did their old numbers. So take them with a grain of salt, I did kind of try to scrounge around a little bit, see if I could find newer ones. But I was unsuccessful. However, I think, you know, when I went back and was thinking about it, I’m not sure that there’s a good reason why in this time frame, these numbers would have changed a ton. So I’m going to share them and you couldn’t agree or disagree with me. And if I find better data, I’ll be happy to share it. This premise is based on the idea that full redesigns are just wildly inefficient. They are a terrible way to go about improving your website. And that’s true. In the best of circumstances, it becomes even worse if you’re starting from one of the bad premises that we’ve already talked about. So if you’re already coming in with one of these, like weird, vague assessments, why you need a site redesign, this makes it that much worse. So this data goes back. It’s a study that was done by HubSpot back in 2011. And what they found, they talked to a bunch of marketers about website redesigns. And what they found was a third of marketers were not happy with the last redesign, they were part of the 33% ish, only half, or just under half actually finished and launched on time. Because that never happens. I mean, it’s it really is a flip of a coin, whether or not you’re actually going to finish this thing when you’re supposed to only 24% would have qualified themselves as extremely happy. So less than a quarter of them feel like they came in and got what they really wanted out of that deal. And the the stat that I always love is 68% of marketers had been in a redesign in a year or less, even though about a third of them say you should only do it every two to three years. So there’s a very big gap in the practice what you preach section of the choir for that. I mean, you’re looking at almost three quarters of the marketers surveyed had redesign a site in less than a year. Unknown Speaker Mm hmm.

That that is demonstrating a frightening cycle of churn. Because a lot of marketers, especially new ones, when they come into a company, they tend to feel that need to like make their mark, right? You gotta Yeah, you got to put your stamp on things and and rebrand or re message and do all this. And a lot of them see Oh, he designed this way to do that.

because I’m a new hire. But that happens in a lot of places. And not just in this industry, like a lot of industries have that that sort of problem of somebody new comes in with power. And they have to kind of establish themselves. So they’re looking for that, that flag planting moment. Unfortunately, for marketing, they’re looking for very forward looking visible thing for that. And the website makes for an easy target and a lot of cases. Yeah, what they found was in the redesigns that were done, they spent roughly between $54,000 and $69,000 to complete that redesign. And it generally took on average about 5.1 months to do that whole project.

Yeah. So to put that into context, and this is just one of those kind of a maybe don’t redesign, you’re basically saying you could go out and hire a full time web developer for about $127,000 a year or two really great web developers for a year or three pretty okay, web developers for a year. You can empower yourself to do a lot with that money in that time. If that’s what you’re after.

Yeah. So the the magic word that you said was one time? Mm hmm. And the reality is that most places don’t go through this problem one time.

they do not they go through frequent and it becomes very quickly apparent that Yeah, okay, yeah, maybe you’re not spending all that money in total every year. But I think you can definitely make the case for the value of a redesign, not generally being worth it. Yeah, and let’s say I’m, I’m passionate about this idea. I think redesigns generally aren’t good use of time, money resources, especially when money is being spent. If the differences between sending that money away, or bringing people into the fold that can help you, you know, long term, investing in yourself is always the better, better value on that. And keeping in mind that when you do a full website redesign, it’s never just design, never just design, it’s always including supplemental stuff, whether that means you’re doing content writing, you’re changing your IA, you’re doing the new CMS implementation, you’re swapping out other hardware, other supplemental technologies, like you your email marketing system, all of these things at scale, and increase the efficiency of the project. Because what happens is, everybody goes, Well, we’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater, till we might as well do these other things too, even though those other things aren’t always immediately related to the value of the project.

It’s I mean, and this all goes back to why I’m so like, opposed to this idea of the redesign, because no matter how you slice it, it’s an expensive process. Yeah, it’s you’re either sending money away, or you’re spending your own, you know, salary basis on it. But no matter how you cut it, it’s a huge sort of almost like a black hole, because you generally will get something out of it in the end, but it just has such a huge margin of error, go back to that stat 49% finished and launch on time.

The deadlines are arbitrary, right? They’re all just kind of picked out of thin air and they’re set at the very onset of a project rather than waiting, you know, and and doing a way through. They, they tend to be politically arbitrary.

So if if you want to do this and do it right, you know, if you’re in a in a bind, and you know, redesign is coming, and you want to at least try to set yourself up for success. There are some things you can do, though, and these are the How to weather the storm kind of points. First and foremost. And one of the most important things to any project, let alone a redesign is make sure you know what your key performance indicators are before you start. That’s when if you’ve ever heard somebody throw it around the phrase KPI. KPI is the thing that matters. What is the thing you will measure that will tell you what is working and what isn’t? The reason you need to know it before you redesign is because you need it baseline. Yeah, you can’t redesign and then say, hey, how is this thing doing if that thing didn’t even exist beforehand.

If the number of leads you get in the day is considered a KPI you know that? That goes back to this this argument, right? Well, we need to generate more leads. Okay, well, that’s a goal. And it’s a goal we can measure. That is one KPI among many that we would consider in a redesign. So we know what is our number? Is it five? Is it 50? Whatever it is, how much do you want to increase that? What do you think the capacity is can be increased by 20% 8%? Let’s set a goal. And then I do identify why the changes you’re going to make in the redesign should affect that. If they say we were getting 10 a day, we think we can get 12 a day. And we think these changes will do it. That’s a very well defined kind of strategy, then because now you can go back, you can do that, measure it for six months, and then see did our average go up to 12? Did it go down to eight, then measure that and figure it out.

I say that that. That’s the the other side of that argument, though. The KPI thing is to also make sure you know what is working. Yeah, because you don’t want to throw out the stuff that’s working that already. Because there’s no possible way at all that your website is a complete and utter failure across the board. Maybe if you’re coming into a site that was designed 15 years ago, and was never updated. Sure. But generally speaking, if you’ve got a site that is relatively modern, in any aspect that has had any attention paid to it, and you’re at a company that makes money, the site is doing something well,

fair. And if you don’t know what those things are, you risk doing more damage than less, you’re going to change things that you shouldn’t have changed, you know, maybe the reality is you’re getting a great number of leads. And one of the goals of the redesign is that they want to change the branding of the company. And this is one of those reasons that you’ll hear from time to time, the branding of the company is changing. So the site has to change, new color palette, new logos, we’re trying to we’re trying to appeal to 17 to 34 year old chimps, whatever that list looks like. And so if you’re making that change, but you know, your lead generation system is rock solid, you want to be careful about how you change stuff around it. Because while they want to increase their appeal to that demographic, you don’t want to throw out the old demographic necessarily.

Yeah. And the, this KPI kind of argument also goes all the way back to the very first thing we said, you know, this idea that, you know, somebody came in and said, well, they don’t like it. Yeah, not liking it isn’t a KPI. And if somebody comes in and says, Well, I don’t like it, I don’t care. Because generally speaking, the people, you know, if it’s your management, or another group within your company, or the sales division, or whoever, if they’re coming to you and saying, well, we don’t like this, you know, it doesn’t work for us, we’re going to read, we want to redesign the site, because all the stuff is bad. It takes a firm hand to sit them down and say, You know what, but you’re not the user. I need a, I need a KPI to anchor this too. And we’ll work on that. But if you aren’t the user, you’re not going to affect that.

entirely sure how to take that. I don’t know if that’s a genius, or that should get you fired.

I mean, it does, it goes to the superficial reality of some of those requests. And yeah, and how important or not as the case may be to the business value of those decisions. KPIs are all about business value, it’s all about identifying the things that are worth doing, why they’re worth doing it, and how you make sure that you’re getting that out of it. And you can’t do that on a whim. You can’t do it on emotion. Yeah, you know, this idea of somebody who just instinctual II can sniff the skies and know a tornado is coming. That’s just not how it works. in this field, it’s there is you know, I say there’s a lot of art to good design all of this. And that’s true. But it’s also a shit ton of science, that tells us the way humans behave and and the way we can measure things and the way we can figure stuff out,

So the next part of this is to make sure that you’ve got a redesign coming, make sure because you know, the word redesign has that key word in it design. And like we said, The redesigns rarely our scope to that small, what you’ll end up realizing is that you need to make sure that somebody is taking the time to align strategy, get your technology stacks in order, get your designers on the same page, and get content people involved, because generally speaking, all of those things are very likely going to get touched at some point. Get stakeholders involved early. Yes, yo, yes. Anybody you can talk to that is going to have an opinion. They need to have their moment in the sun.

you have to be prepared for some of that too, though, because the reality is, no matter how many times I say that in the course of an episode, the reality is, the reality is that people do ignore the cops, they do ignore the mockups, they don’t pay attention to the way content is laying out, they don’t pay attention to the warm up some or even the real content. In some cases, like you have to be prepared for that. And because most of the time, those folks are sitting in a meeting that was scheduled for them or showed up on their calendar, so they’re just there. And there, that’s where that’s where the PM comes in, you gotta have either you have to have a formal, who’s overseeing the project, or you have to have someone on that side of the table, who will advocate or follow up with all the stakeholders and stay on them, and make sure that they’re kept up to speed on things. Because really, I’m serious like this, this will bite you in the ass every time. wrangle your stakeholders are which PM are you referring to a project manager, I didn’t know if you were going towards product or project. Because for some places, it is the product managers job to deal with that.

if you outsource your your project manager, maybe the guy at the other company who doesn’t have a lot of direct contact,

That’s that’s the thing is just making sure the right people are empowered there. And it’s also important because you a you need that person to align all of these different silos. So they’re on the same drumbeat. Because many times they’re all on their own cycle, your IT department, if you show up a week before, you’re ready to start putting stuff in and say, Hey, we’re launching over they will see a mass, you have a laugh it Yeah. You don’t surprise them with requests like that, because they may be developing 17 other things right now, all of which have at least the appearance of more importance because of the CEO wanting them or they’re on a maintenance cycle that has to be met, or they’ve got a license that they have to deal with.

Well imagine showing up and saying, hey, by the way, we’ve got this brand new CMS, don’t worry, you don’t have to do anything. Oh, my vendor hosts it. All we need is you just need to integrate Shibboleth with it.

And you’re on an old app campus.

But it’s those kind of, you know, if you’re not involving these people, and you’re not making sure they’re all on the same page with you, your vendor is going to tell you the whole time. And just to explain Shibboleth is a single sign on protocol. So large organizations will use it to make it so that you use the same login for all of the different things fairly widely used fairly widely known. If a vendor says, Oh, yeah, we can absolutely support your existing logins, you’ll just have your IT staff, you know, set the Shibboleth connector, and you’ll be good to go. And your marketing team or whoever is in charge of the purchases great. And then you show up and nobody stopped to think maybe we should have made sure that is the one we use. Or maybe it’s just a straight up matter of Yeah, we do have Shibboleth but we don’t just connect it to random third parties. You know, there may be secure concerns that have to come into play and all this and they may say, yeah, we can do it. But you’re going to have to undergo a security audit, you have to have you know this, you’re gonna have to have this kind of test, you know, we’re going to bring in some folks and they’re going to do a pen tests are going to do these things we have to have, you know, such and such a verification from them. And they’re telling you that’s going to take six months just by itself to get through and you’re supposed to launch in two weeks. Because you were told that oh, well, you’ll just have them turn on Shibboleth and it’ll it takes them an hour. Well, yeah, it does. If there’s nothing in the way, and sometimes organizations have stuff in the way,

I would worry less about you know, the listeners being the ones who would fall prey to that. And they would be on the receiving end of the folks who did. Yeah. And that’s where it’s like, you just have to be ready to ask those questions. And be ready to at the outset. Say, whatever timeline you’re coming to me with, if this is the first time hearing about it, we need to adjust expectations. And make sure we sit down and go over this. And here’s why. Most, in most cases, explaining why something has to be slowed down or won’t make a deadline is all that is required to make that be true. And we sometimes feel like we don’t want to have that conversation or it’s not going to be well received or anything like that. But lying and saying oh yeah, we’ll get it and then miss a deadline or whatever. That’s way worse. Oh, we don’t do that. And I’m a firm believer in also not necessarily taking the blame other people’s, you know, what is the, your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on life or emergency. Yeah, I’m a firm believer in that. And I will do everything I can to help you be successful. But I’m also not going to be unrealistic. And if I think something that you think is going to take a day, but I think it’s going to take a month, I’m not going to compromise and say it’s going to take a week. But I’ll tell you, it’s gonna take a month and next time, we’re going to have to sit down and talk about this. Here’s why I can’t do it faster. And here’s how you can help me do it faster next time.

And the challenge to That is right. To the stakeholders viewpoint. That is now a project that has taken eight months. But they don’t understand you know, the from a lot of the stakeholders standpoints like they don’t care. That’s and they don’t, they shouldn’t have to, quite frankly, and in many cases, but that’s sort of that outward vision. And that’s where like having that PM involved, we do the same thing for what it’s worth, like it’s there. I’ve sat through a lot of meetings that are necessarily a valuable use of my time, like in that moment. But it’s always good to have that ear. Because it’s gonna pick up time when I know, oh, hey, I remember them talking about this, I can let other folks know, hey, here’s what I heard. You know, this is probably gonna be coming in the next couple of weeks. Let’s kind of make sure we ask those some questions leading up to that. And those kinds of opportunities come up all the time. And it just requires somebody to make sure they’ve got their Google Hangout left open, and they’re listening while they’re writing some code or something.

And maybe it’s as simple as them shipping you a different connector, you know, it can be a very simple fix at that point.

So the other thing you can do to always help a website redesign and I’m a big fan of this. If you go back to and listen to our 10 commandments of UX, it’s one of the commandments of UX that was listed, find reference models, steal stuff, look for ideas that match what people want. Especially if somebody says, Well, I don’t like something. Okay, well help me understand what you do, like, give me you know, three websites that do the thing that you want us to do and how they do it. So I can look at what they’re doing as a reference model and pick out exactly what that common thread is. So yeah, this works really well for users that aren’t good at articulating, you know, UI lingo and, or like experience type stuff by them saying, Okay, yeah, if you go to, you know, such and such calm and, and this place.org, and all this and look at the way they do it. If you’re, you know, experienced at web development, you built stuff you can, you can look at those things and say, Oh, I see what he’s doing, that getting reference models for that stuff is incredibly useful. Because it just helps center ideas and lets you attach, because the reality is, and, again, lots of UX. Most people are doing stuff on other sites, not yours. We’ve said this before, and it’s worth reiterating, make sure you are communicating all the time. Like, literally like I’m in the middle of a project right now, it’s not a redesign. It’s a redesign of tool, but not have a site. But as we are doing this redesign of the tool, we have daily meetings with the stakeholder five minutes. It’s not an hour, it’s not a half hour, five minutes, we pull them into a meeting, just real quick to say, here’s what we’ve done today. Here’s what we can show you right now and get feedback on. does everything look like it should? Great, we’ll see you tomorrow,

I like the idea of the five minute meetings, in part because it it gives you the opportunity to manage those expectations and say, yeah, we made progress on another thousand pages today. Just remember, once we get through the next 5000, it’s going to slow down, because now we get to the heart, like yeah, you can reinforce that message frequently. And yes, with only five or 10 minutes to sit down and just go over what’s been done for the day, there’s not a lot of time to get caught in the weeds as a result, either.

well be clear about the things that you don’t know to like, you will always run into certain amounts of work that are either going to require you to learn a new tool or require a change in implementation to something you’re not used to. And those unknown unknowns, or, you know, sometimes the known unknowns can still have a clock associated with them that isn’t fully registered yet. We aren’t omniscient on some of that.

inventories are tough though, because they’re so big, whether it’s you know, file inventories, content inventories, you know, if you’ve got 100,000 pages on your website, which may sound like a lot to a lot of folks, but isn’t for many sites, that’s very hard to take an audit of. And even you know, when you start getting into hundreds of pages, if they are legitimate pages, you know, and they have to be there for a number of reasons. you’re logging metadata, you’re logging page titles, descriptions, meta images, all this kind of stuff, there gets to be point where you’re working at a scale where you cease to be as productive. And that that’s where that challenges. Again, going back to this idea of aligning your content strategy. Make sure that’s all part of this, because in theory, if you if your content is going to be involved in a redesign, then you need content people also dedicated who will be doing the work to, you know, maybe you have to change the way certain phrases are used, we’ve had that happen where like, a product was rebranded. And so as a consequence, every usage of the old phrase had to be swapped out for the new one. And there are things like that, that content people for the exact exact same way as it folks, they need time and lead up to be able to prepare that if they have to scan all of these pages for those references. They need to know that

It’s also a great opportunity, though, to tackle a lot of things. So for instance, you know, if you’re doing a redesign, it’s the perfect opportunity to take that time and make sure you’re including good accessibility techniques into the mix. Oh, yeah, that’s, you know, one of the big things that always comes out of these conversations is they want to redesign because they need to improve their SEO. Yeah, I’m gonna let that slide. That’s a, that’s a relatively okay. Tactical goal that you want to drive more organic traffic, everybody wants more organic traffic, but by using realizing good accessibility patterns, what you’re going to do is drive up your SEO, because you’re ensuring your content reads well to anything. And that’s the best possible opportunity to do that. And also make sure that you’re not going backwards on it.

You know, it’s that’s like easy work, if you’re going to do it all the do it all.

I’ve said a lot about why I hate the idea of wholesale redesigns, I keep saying, you know, they’re a waste of time, they’re waste of money, they’re a waste of resources, because it’s like getting tired of your house and deciding that you’re going to tear your house down and build a new one, instead of just moving your furniture around, change the carpet, paint the room, fix the roof, you can do these things on a house incrementally, for good reason. And we can do the same thing with websites. And it’s been the growing trend to encourage this idea of just doing redesigns but you do them incrementally, you do them in very small bite sized chunks, a little bit of time. Arguably, it’s been very hard to do that to this point. Because the speed with which of the web changes, causes sites to become severely outdated, fairly fast. And from, you know, 2000 to 2012 13. That actually was I think, the sort of flavor of the day, you would walk into a site and it would be already be outdated. And you were stuck using, let’s say, Adobe contribute as your content platform. And you need to move into an actual CMS. You know, there was a lot of this stuff that was shifting and moving very quickly, Brunton techniques changed very fast technology was updated 2015, you get the update to JavaScript came out and made new things possible. So it was a very tumultuous time. I think, for developers in general, even though we were saying this back, then we said this exact thing, then the people were still dealing with that fact that they would look at their whole site. And like, I would love to work incrementally, but I don’t even know where to start, because everything is old. I think today, that’s different. I think things have slowed down. And I think we’re getting to a place where we’re talking about tools and techniques that do lead start thinking very seriously about how we start changing things slowly and steadily and strategically over time.

I’ll throw a link in the show notes to an article from monster insights that goes over how to get started using Google Optimize turn a B tests, because the AB test is the Keystone to doing good incremental changes.

So here’s the thing, right? This idea that if you don’t redesign, if you don’t do anything to a site, it spoils. And we’ve used phrases before to describe this, you know, phrases like content rot code rot, you put a bowl of fruit on the table, it just it goes bad over time, and websites do the same thing. The designs get dated the techniques, you know, think about the way we used to use drop shadows and gradients and color palettes, the way graphics were approached, all of these things change over time. And you go back and look at an old site that hasn’t been maintained well, and you can see this kind of just break down of it. This incremental approach, what that’s because that’s the thing, that’s what triggers somebody to say, well, we got to throw the baby out with the bathwater. They look at the site. And that it is it has gotten so bad that you have no choice but to redesign. And the sad thing that is not acknowledged is we failed to produce at plan out of our last redesign. That kept us in motion,

The reality is where full redesigns are wildly inefficient. incremental redesigns are probably the most efficient way you can possibly approach design,

from month one to month three, your site’s not going to really look any different. From month one the month 12, it probably will. But it’s that slow burn kind of change. And it doesn’t feel super effective, you know, to marketing or to your, you know, management team or whomever. But it’s designed to do that it’s designed to be able to go tweak things, adjust, measure, run your AV test, pick something that you think isn’t working, well figure out what the best way is to do it, and then make that change that one individual change. Because here’s the thing, when you’ve got an incremental change that is on a single element or a single type of pattern, you can measure that when you change your whole site in a redesign. It all the KPIs in the world don’t really help you measure everything.

Instead of just I don’t like this. The reason this is true, and the reason it works is for anytime you’ve ever done any kind of science, you know, science experiment in school, or something. And when they teach you about, you know, multivariate testing versus you know, single variable. When you change your whole website, you’ve changed a bunch of variables all at once. And even if your leads go up, or your sales go up, or whatever, by changing everything at once, it makes it measurably harder to actually know why that happened. You can get right and you can figure out a way to make the analytics, explain it. But one thing you learn over time is that analytics can say a lot of things if you just push them the right way. When you’re changing one one thing at a time, it ensures that the one thing you’re changing is producing the right outcome. Yeah, that’s the bottom line to that. And it means you’re making the smallest, most efficient moves that you can make. Because you pick and choose, right, you may have a list of things you want to change, but you’re going to start with the ones you think will make the biggest changes, and you’re going to work down that list. And over time, what happens is you’re going to find out, well, something failed, we thought making a change to our lead form, and adding a certain field would help us get better leads. And it didn’t, it ended up getting worse leads because they were less well defined for some reason, or people abandon you added a form field, they abandon the field the form more, that’s fine, because that means you can abandon that change, and figure out a better one with that information you made. If you go through a full website redesign and your sales go down, then what do you do? incremental redesigns, let you fail in a much more elegant way. And in a way that lets you learn and get better. which is I think one of the most important pieces of web design that we really aren’t good at yet, as an industry,

The speaking of knowledge base is the final big piece I think of this puzzle is when you’re doing incremental work. And I said earlier that, you know, I think the one reason that this approach has changed in general is because things are stabilizing a little bit. I think it’s because we’re maturing as an industry. And you can see it by us learning to develop design systems, building out pattern libraries, because that gives us sort of the that source of truth. For our websites. Yeah. And so the pattern library may define all the headers on the website. And maybe we are at a point where somebody does say, Hey, we want to change kind of the look and feel of the site, what can you do for us, you can go in and say, You know what, yeah, here’s the three style of headers that we have. Why don’t we update that pattern will use will use a different font for this, you know, we’re only using the spot here It feels out of place. Let’s make it match the font down below. But we’ll do you know such and such to it,

And anytime you’ve got that record. And I think you know, the pattern library is where it really starts. Because at the end of the day, it’s all about efficiency. And it’s about identifying patterns, not pages, you’ll find yourself in a redesign, figuring out layouts, well, we need a two column layout, we need the three column layout, we’re going to need this weird four column layout, but it’s only going to be used on this one page. That’s an inefficient way to go about design. Because column layouts are easy. What matters are the cards that go on. And what matters are the individual elements that are embedded there. And giving the attention to those because those are the thing where the rubber meets the road in terms of our forums, here’s our forum pattern. And you can target all of these things. And that pattern library becomes this growing, evolving utility, that whenever somebody says, Hey, can we do x? You’re able to pull out the book, so to speak, and say, Yep, we got three ways to do it. Which one do you want? And if they say, oh, none of those are real good, then you can stand and say, can we? Maybe we have an opportunity, then? And we’ll, we’ll use that as that growth point to add in the new feature of the what, what’s your goal? What are you trying to accomplish? Let’s work that in right, and we’ll we’ll make a tweak to that element. Instead of you coming and say, You know what, we’re going to build a whole landing page for this, well, we don’t need to do. Let’s do the small thing. And we have that, that sort of flower bed to work with there. Eventually, you’re going to come up and somebody’s going to say you know what, you we need a whole new CMS, the CMS we’re using is no good. And that’s going to necessitate a lot of background work and some other stuffs going to get thrown in there. So redesign gonna happen. But until you have that really good, gotta rebrand, you gotta do X, Y, or Z that is truly necessary. This gets you from point A to point z by going through every other letter in the alphabet first. And it lets you look ahead of you and look behind you and know sort of what that path looks like. Yeah. Alright, folks, kick back. We’re gonna take a quick break and come back and we will round things out and Unknown Speaker talk to you later.

The drunken UX podcast is brought to you by our friends at New cloud. New cloud is an industry leading interactive map provider who has been building location based solutions for organizations for a decade. Are you trying to find a simple solution to provide your users with an interactive map of your school city or business? Will new clouds interactive map platform gives you the power to make and edit a custom interactive map in just two minutes. They have a team of professional cartographers who specialize in map illustrations of many different styles, and are ready to design and artistic rendering to fit your exact needs. One map serves all of your users devices with responsive maps that are designed to scale and blend in seamlessly with your existing website. To request a demonstration, or to view their portfolio, visit them online at New cloud.com slash drunken UX that’s in you cloud.com slash drunken UX. I hope you found this helpful. I know this was a weird rambling episode for a change. But I just felt like kind of talking about our experience here. And hopefully, did you know you got something out of it. You ever have questions for us? Let us know. We’re happy to kind of explain anything we went into. And, you know, give you some advice. If you feel like you’re in a tough spot with the up theory design.

podcast. And if you are feeling so inclined, run into your app of choice wherever you’re listening to the show today. Get your thumbs up, give us a rating review, share the episode, anything, just let us know that you’re enjoying things and let other people know that you’re enjoying things. We appreciate it. We hope you appreciate all the effort that we put into it. And if you don’t then let us know that will change something maybe I don’t know. We’ll do it. We can outside of that. Let me see it’s it’s late at night. I’ve got some empty bottles sitting here I need to throw away. I’ve got to probably go use the restroom at some point. I’m going to go to bed. I know I know. TMI. But it gets worse than that. Because I have really TMI because the big thing that I have to end the show with is just let you know that you got to keep your personas