Five Popular Web Strategies That Don't Work
At your next moment of change and opportunity, what kind of leader will you be?
This question arose again recently as we kicked off a major web project with a client. The goals of the project were typical enough: improve usability, differentiate the firm, and close the gap with competitors.
But that was the problem. These goals have become the stock objectives for most major web initiatives, pulled from the shelf and recycled for every website and product redesign. And it’s not hard to see why. They’re safe. They’re familiar to your colleagues. They provide easy benchmarks and sometimes easy wins.
Goals like these may lead to change, but they rarely lead to progress. They’re conventional thinking that will produce, at best, a conventional outcome.
Because recognition is the first step toward recovery, here are the five most common off-the-shelf web strategies that we see in our work:
Strategy #1: Parity
The parity play involves watching what your competitors do, and then either copying them or one-upping them. Parity is seductive because it’s easy and safe. And it can lead to incremental improvements. But it’s just as likely that you’re imitating an expensive tactic that didn’t work for your competitor. In either case, you can never lead your market by following the pack.
Takeaway: Don’t chase your competitors. Chase your customers.
Strategy #2: Novelty
Every business wants to be new and different, so many business leaders equate innovation with novelty. They think if they introduce something new—something that nobody else offers—they will differentiate themselves and capture attention. But what’s new isn’t necessarily valuable or better than the alternatives. In fact, few business breakthroughs are actually new:
- Apple didn’t invent the graphical user interface, digital music player or smartphone. They vastly improved on existing products.
- Google didn’t invent the search engine.
- Nintendo didn’t invent the video game.
Takeaway: Newer isn’t better. Better is better.
Strategy #3: Usability
Most web initiatives cite improved usability as a business objective. While usability is a must for long-term success, it’s really just table stakes. If your websites and products aren’t useful as well as usable, then all the usability in the world won’t help you.
Takeaway: Be useful first. Then be usable.
Strategy #4: Technology
This remains the most common approach to web innovation. It involves making a list of feature ideas or technologies, and then designing your websites or products around them. Designing products based on feature lists leads to unsatisfactory experiences because those lists aren’t oriented to the perspective and needs of your customers. In fact, the majority of your customers don’t care about features and technology. They just want products that are useful to them.
Takeaway: Design your business around people, not technologies.
Strategy #5: Epiphany
The notion of an epiphany—that next big idea that will change everything for your organization and industry—is at once the most seductive and dangerous of web strategies. It’s seductive because it is glorified in the business press and in our cultural myths about how innovation happens. It’s dangerous because it is the business equivalent of the half-court shot. While epiphanies sometimes do happen, they’re too unreliable as a business strategy because they can’t be controlled.
Takeaway: Don’t bank on epiphanies. Processes that are repeatable and controllable are the most reliable sources of innovation.
The Solution: Aim to Be Remarkable
Remarkable sells. Remarkable gets and holds attention. Remarkable is memorable, unique and inspiring. Remarkable builds successful companies like Zappos and breakthrough products like the iPhone.
In fact, if you don't aim to be remarkable, you are unlikely to achieve even adequacy after the vicissitudes and compromises of any major web initiative. Obvious you say? Perhaps, but rarely practiced because it involves taking risks.
So, at your next moment of change and opportunity, what kind of leader will you be?
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Scott, I have been in sales for - I hate to say it - over 40 years. When I opened a small business crafting persuasive website content, I went straight back to the basics of Sales 101 that I learned my first day with Scott Paper Company in 1978. The very first thing they taught us was how to craft a benefit/ feature statement and how not to confuse the value of the two - from the perspective of the customer. Though many things have changed over the years, basic human motivation has not changed one whit. When working with clients, I try to get them to answer one thing from the client's user perspective. All else revolves around it. Answer the WIIFM question; What's In It For Me? I could care less if some of this may seem familiar to me and to some of the readers. And from years of working with clients, some of them quite brilliant, I can tell you from experience that these things are not at all obvious nor arrived at intuitively. there is noting wrong with repeating an idea in words that may reach a reader while someone else's words did not. That is the art of persuasion. It is extraordinarily difficult to accomplish these important tasks in such a manner that causes readers to engage and thereby be motivated to action. It just looks easy when it is well done. In someone else's words, fascinate or go home.
I admit to having been out of the sales and marketing field for over 20 years, but my point, at countless board meetings, was get the customer to design what they want, and then make it work; they often know their markets best. Sorry if it's a bit simplistic.
Thanks everyone for the great comments. A few of you mentioned that you found my article to be obvious in its points, and I must confess I agree. They are obvious: to you, me, and most of us in the UX field. What I've learned from my work, though, is they are often not obvious to others, including very smart decision-makers in corporate marketing and web departments who are responsible for redesigning their websites. That's what prompted this article; the experience of seeing the same mistakes being made over and over again for many years. I guess this means job security for UX practitioners! Thanks again.
Foregone and redundant... possibly mildly offensive. Anybody else got reminded of the joke about the shepherd and the consultant, reading this?
The idea of general rtraseint is really interesting. It reminds me of the Microsoft designs the iPod package video. The success of Apple's clear, minimal, and simple design is validated by their ability to create a successful brand image. From a birds-eye-view, they don't harp on feature lists or benefits. The idea is about listening to music or talking on the phone. Sure, they'll list the features on their website, or in a detailed presentation, but to an uneducated buyer they just see coolness. What's most interesting is that they've reached a state where the community will do that for them; people write about how good the product is before anyone has any proof.
This post seems like a really literal and cheap rip-off of Adaptive Path's book "Subject To Change".
Bravo!!! I love your article! I am so impressed after reading it and I learned so much. Please write some more.
Is this article for thick people or what? I cannot see the point in writing a series of obvious remarks.
digital innovation consultancy: does this equate with ripping stupid off?