How To Sell Your Design

Smashing Magazine posted this article yesterday, and I thought it was worth sharing. A big part of my job has become customer relations, learning how to sell a client on a design concept or brand. Designers tend to think of the art of the design, but forget about the business aspect of it. Here are 5 tips to remember.

1. Pretty doesn’t mean effective: statistics are your friend!
Designers like to show off portfolios. It can look stunning, but business people like to see numbers. What was the conversion rate on that opt in? What was the bounce rate and average time on site? What was the most clicked on link from the home page?

2. Every design should have a measurable goal
Saying that the goal is to “build the brand of XYZ” or “create an online presence” is basically meaningless to a business-minded person. A goal is only a goal if it is measurable.

3. Your site should have one clear path
As a customer comes to your site, you want to be in complete control of the 1st thing they see, the 2nd, the 3rd, and all the way down until they accomplish your goal that you’ve set. In other words, they have entered your sites “funnel” or “chute”.

4. Remember the swiss army knife
One of the best analogies I’ve ever heard about design came from Marissa Mayer at Google. She said that Google tries to think of its design like a Swiss army knife. It has tons of features neatly tucked away inside, but you don’t see them all at once. A first time user might come to the site and just the main knife is flipped open. It’s immediately clear what the main benefit and purpose of this thing is: it’s a knife. But for the advanced users, a little thumbnail catch is still visible so they can slowly start to pull out lesser used features when they’re needed.

5. Provide performance metrics
Finally, if you really want to impress business people, put together a little report of how a design performs. It doesn’t have to be fancy — maybe a little spreadsheet (those business types do love Excel) with some basic metrics you can pull off of Google Analytics like visitors, time on site, most popular funnel path, and even a goal conversion rate.

Conclusion
This article may offend some designers. You may think it’s off topic, not your concern, or counterproductive to good design. That’s fine — take what works for you and leave the rest.

Speaking in a language the customer understands is key to good communication in any business. Whenever you get deep into a field and become an expert, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the rest of the world doesn’t think like you.

Read the full article here.

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