Avoiding the One-Sided Triangle

There is a push down at the hospital to revisit and revamp our branding and print collateral and this needs to be tied into our external Web site. All of this makes perfect sense. At some point it was decided to have an external vendor, one with much more experience with branding than we do, come in and do this work. Again, making perfect sense. It looks like now, rather than simply working on the brand and print collateral, they will be a big part of our external Web redesign as well.

This is the same job that I was hired on for. I’m a Web designer, first and foremost, so, as you can imagine I’m a bit apprehensive of letting a few more cooks come in and stir my pot. This is nothing if not typical of many larger organizations, external folks seem to always get more respect and better access to decision makers than do internal people. I’ve seen it all before, in fact I have a story in the works that talks about when this can go terribly, terribly wrong. In this case I think it’ll be fine. If you want a bit of a bleaker outlook, read Brian’s thoughts.

At this point, I’m resigned to the fact that we are going to have to work with these people, and in their own right I imagine they will bring some quality skills, a professional attitude and some great ideas to the table. For this to be a success we need to work with them as a team.

I’m not without my concerns. The company is a graphic design firm, with some Web skill sets. They don’t have a whole lot in the way of Web design and development skills. This is evidenced by their portfolio. There is a big difference between graphic design (for the Web or other wise) and Web design. I’m worried about building what I like to call the One-Sided Triangle, where one-third of the sites goals are met.

The goals on this project have been shaky and somewhat fluid from day one. At points in recent history I even felt like this external firm was dictating our organization’s goals to us. Not a good situation. In my own mind, a truly stellar Web presence has three distinct sets of goals: the business goals, the organizational goals and the users goals. Business goals and organizational goals sound the same but are different. Business goals would be things like branding, marketing, and profit driven goals. Organizational goals would be like communication, maintainability, and planning for future growth.

While, depending on the project, these goals can carry various weights, and to be realistic, most of the time, the business goals are the most important, but they are all important in their own right. In effect, they support each other. To truly succeed they all need to be addressed. Otherwise you have a One-Sided Triangle — not a pretty site.

For this project, our internal Web team had done quite a bit of work on what we saw as the goals. We’ve done tons of research on our users, nailed down the information architecture (this will not change thank goodness) and began to plan for a strategy that would be flexible, accessible and easy to maintain. We didn’t spend too much time on things like branding, because we didn’t have access to those requirements — read GOALS.

It my hope that we will be able to take the organizational and user goals we as a Web team have identified and made progress towards, and meld those to the business goals we’ve been given. In my mind this needs to happen for our site to be the best it can possibly be.

It should be an interesting situation, one not without it’s conflict, the source of which should be fairly evident. I’ll keep posting about it and I’m sure there will be some lessons learned. Hopefully, sometime in the not too distant future, I’ll have an external site design to show you. Hopefully it’ll match my, and my team’s vision, of what it can be.

A solid platinum triangle. ;)

UPDATE - The meeting wen’t well. As expected they have some solid ideas to bring to the table and seemed to be interested in not only building the brand out via the Web, but also keeping the site fluid and maintainable. Our team should mesh well with theirs, and hopefully they can teach us a bit about brandiing, because I plan on giving them the skinny on Web standards, fluid Web design and the beauties of CSS. Well, I guess I should add the benefits of usability, accessibility and information architecure to the list, after all they are basicly a graphic design firm and might not have those skill sets.

I’ll let you know how it works out.