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To illustrate this, let’s imagine two designers, John Tom and Maria, who are creating medium-size content websites – say about 300 pages of well-designed, clearly written information.
- John Tom is from the school of genius design. He believes that he creates great websites because he is a talented designer and his past work was praised.
- Maria is from the school of empirical design. She believes she is a good designer, but she knows that she will not get everything right the first time, so she uses a variety of research tools to inform (and correct) her designs as she goes.
Tom and the genius method
Having studied the content and talked to the site’s internal stakeholders, John Tom thinks a lot, then opens a new spreadsheet and creates a text tree of possible headings and subheadings, based on the various types of activities that the site offers.
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Eventually, a consultant is brought in to do some usability testing on the site and recommend fixes. One of the major issues she finds is that the site is organized in a way that makes sense to the project team, but not to one of their two major audiences. Some of this can be fixed with simple terminology changes, but some of it will require fundamental changes to the site structure, which will in turn require a good deal of content rework.
No one (including JohnTom) wanted this result, but now that they know about it, it can be fixed in release 2. New features will have to wait until later, if they can get funding.
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Maria and the empirical method
Like JohnTom, Maria starts by studying the content and talking to the site’s internal stakeholders. She also asks about any existing user research, and receives the results of a site survey done the previous year.
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She then opens a new spreadsheet and creates a text tree of possible headings and subheadings, based on the various types of activities that the site offers. (John Tom also did this.)
She then creates a second tree that is also activities-based, but uses a different organizing method for the next level down (based on another finding she picked up from the card sort).
- ss of two alternative tree ideas in spreadsheet
Like JohnTom, Maria checks her ideas with the project team and revises some terminology accordingly. Most of her team prefers her first tree to her second, which confirms her own preference.
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In our experience, an astonishing number of websites are created using John’s Tom’s genius method (or something very close to it). The Johns Toms of the design world may be talented, but they are often curiously reluctant to use empirical tools to test their designs before the website ships. And the odds of them getting everything right the first time are very low. That translates into a high risk for the organization.
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