Month: November 2024
What is a good website?
Most people and businesses know they need to have a website, but few can tell you what a good website does. In this post we’ll break down our definition of a good website and make it easy for you to see if your website is good.
What does “good” mean?
Good is a subjective term but it needs to be defined. At Drive Digital, we always start from a common definition that helps anchor the design process. We have seen many projects and websites get slowed down or increase in cost because definitions of success – like good – aren’t defined in the beginning. This checklist represents a key slice of our definition of good websites.
It meets a specific purpose.
Websites perform best when they are made for a specific purpose. As a tool for communication & business, when websites aren’t living to that purpose, then they aren’t good. Fortunately, this is fixable. By defining a singular purpose, a website can be turned from bad to good to great.
It communicates to its customer well.
Good websites use plain language, short and simple sentences, and clear writing as a way to simply communicate value and what customers need to do to work with a brand. We also look at how the website includes people with disabilities, as they are too often a forgotten audience when a website is made.
It has simple branding.
Good websites have simple branding to make the website an extension of their real-world brand. Good sites can use their brand to effectively expedite customer and business needs. The best ones can also do it well or better when accessing the site from a mobile device.
It represents everything you do.
A good website makes it easy for your audience & customer to see everything you do. Your website is your home base, and it should bring together everything you do: pieces of your social, your value proposition, your social, how you make business easy, your voice, and an invitation for new customers to join you. This is what I call your “total value” – if your customer can’t see your total value, your website isn’t good.
It takes care of the invisible side of digital.
Good websites take care of the invisible work of digital: site search, Google search, site navigation, and meeting legal compliance. The better ones do this in a way that makes them feel fast and fluid to your audience & customer.
It is easy to maintain and update.
This is something missed by nearly every company out there. A good website will allow you to quickly add new functions, change to market conditions, and bring new employees up to speed. This step saves a lot of time, money, and headache, and if you don’t consider this when you make your website, you’re going to pay for it in lost opportunity and time in meeting customer needs.
Its cost & ROI is easy to calculate.
A website is a tool for you, and if you’re not looking at its cost and what you’re getting out of the website, then you’re not using it to its maximum potential. While it’s almost an unspoken rule that everyone needs a website, you should also ask & understand what value your website is giving you and your customer.
Want to see if your website is good?
Contact usWhat is the value of people in digital?
One of the concerns we hear from people who we talk to about digital is about automation, artificial intelligence, and how to do more with your tech dollar. An overlooked expenditure is the people in your organization and on your team. In this post, we will break down why it is important to understand the value of people when you work in a digital world.
People are a value-add to digital.
Many tech organizations and businesses view people as resources, not as a value-add. They are seen as weaknesses or things that should be managed to prevent loss to a company. Here at Drive Digital, we don’t believe that all. We fully believe that people are the greatest strength in tech and should be treated as such. While there may be an occasional “bad apple”, more often than not people want to do honest work and do what’s right. We see each person as their: 1) their value-add, 2) their goals and how tech is aligned to them, 3) what values they have, 4) how willing they are to listen and understand to contrary points of view, 5) what transferrable skills they have from past experiences, and 6) their perception of how computers & technology can make life better for people
People make it easier to do more than math with a computer.
Computers first started out as data processing and number crunching machines. That’s still happening, and it’s an important task to help in the evolution of science. However, people are looking at new ways to use processing to complete important tasks. From scheduling a meeting to paying bills to even connecting with others, a computer’s utility has greatly increased due to the value of people and their influence over digital.
People’s needs and curiosity pushes the limits of technology.
As computers and technology are more ever-present, our need to push the limits of technology and curiosity also increases. When we work with a client at Drive Digital, we not only look at what someone needs now, but we look at what they may need in the next 2 years. This allows us to choose the right solution and anticipate the next thing. How do we know this? Because we ask many questions of our clients and customers, which allows us to envision something more powerful than just taking a recipe and making a client the same thing every time.
People teach other skills through digital.
Most websites, apps, and other pieces of technology are intended to be used as tools to complete tasks. In the hands of creators, businesses, and other developers, people have used digital to share new ideas, skills, techniques, and points of view. Without people to create these tools, we wouldn’t use, for example, YouTube to look up visual ways on how to do something, or even Shazaam to help us identify a song that we are listening to that we don’t know. These tools are people teaching others important skills, and that’s one of the major values our company has: teaching about digital as we help clients solve their problems.
People help us validate we are making the right thing.
When creating a new tool, app, or website, it is paramount to include your audience and users in the process. Ultimately, they are the ones who will determine if your piece of technology will work and add value to you. With spending time – and sometimes money – to talk to people and understand their current days, you get to understand the life factors that make doing business successful digitally. Most digital products fail because they skip these two steps. And since we don’t want our clients to fail, we have put the “V” in our process to mean that we verify and validate what clients want with their target market. It may take a second more, but we see it is a way to ensure you get to success.
People are the source of inspiration and creativity.
As a company that makes digital products, it takes time and energy to find inspiration to get to the right answer. However, people provide us with inspiration and creativity every day. For example, we were talking to a potential car shopper the other day, and they were obsessed with getting a particular color, but the dealer didn’t have that color on the lot. Instead of being frustrated, a computer can help someone with this problem. A computer can take a picture or a video, and in real time, substitute the color of the car with another color that the manufacturer makes so that the shopper can really see if that color can work for them. Without talking and listening to people, that idea for an app would never happen (or even be repurposed for other industries, like paint selection).
People are the workforce that make the magic happen.
Like most things in the world, greatness doesn’t happen overnight or at the snap of a finger. Digital takes a lot of elbow grease from many people to make the magic happen. Digital relies upon: designers, content writers, coders, industry experts, financial knowledge, and legal protection. All of those skills don’t come out of the blue, or can’t reside within one person. All of these skills come from a team of people, who work together to make digital work for you. The next time you use a piece of technology, or get frustrated by a piece of technology, know that it came from a lot of people’s time and energy to make it happen. And to make technology better, it relies on that same human talent to push it to the next level.
People provide a purpose for digital.
Without people, digital experiences and products wouldn’t exist. And vice versa. Many now have a sense of purpose now because they have been given a tool to be productive and have an equal chance at life. Technology gives people an unlimited access to the rest of the world, and this instant connection provides people with a purpose and a sense of belonging that would be harder to achieve if we weren’t connected through technology. And without people, it’ll also be harder to add new features into the technology that we already are used to using.
Want to work with someone who gets people?
Contact usHow can digital delight you?
Within the world of digital, most companies try to pursue delight as a way to impress customers. Few teams we have worked with can define delight, which is why we made this post.
What is delight?
Delight is a positive emotion that we all want, but is triggered in different ways for each one of us. At Drive Digital, we define delight as a joyful surprise that stops us in our tracks, in a good way.
What are examples of delight?
In the real world, delight can come from: getting to a deal you didn’t think you were going to get, some extra food, or getting work completed early and getting to go home for the day. In the digital world, delight can come from: completing something faster, when a form fills in information correctly, or you got a recommendation that was accurate. These are examples of good surprises: they make your day better, don’t cost you anything more, and put a smile on your face.
How can you make delight happen?
Here’s a few of our secrets on how we make delight happen at Drive Digital:
- Understand your audience well; really well.
- Know what tasks they want to complete and why. Bonus points if you know what information they need before, during, and after the task is done.
- Understand the context of why your audience wants to complete those tasks and related circumstances.
- Help people complete tasks quickly.
- Provide valuable messaging and offers on what your audience wants to do next and how you can fulfill it.
How can we turn frustration into delight?
Frustrating story: a member of our team recently bought tickets to a concert. They bought two tickets, and it was a really large stadium, which implied traffic was going to be a mess. And trying to find a place to park was going to be a nightmare. And they also didn’t know that they didn’t need a small clear purse to hold important items when going into the stadium – they had to go back and forth from their car to remove items, which also made them almost miss the opening act.
Same story, but with delight: a team member wants to go to a concert, and when buying tickets, they can also buy a parking pass. A few weeks before the concert, the stadium send a reminder about what they bought, and also gives information about stadium rules and logistics. On the day of the concert, they receive a more compact version that gives everything they need, including timing of traffic, how to get to the parking area, the stadium rules & regulations, and concessions & souvenirs that are available at the stadium.
Why this is delight: the stadium now communicates a simple transaction (of purchasing tickets) and providing compact, pertinent information at every step of the way. Customers now have a full experience, and related, known steps already presented to them. And now the customer can focus on the right thing: getting to the stadium and having a good time, with no hiccups.
How can we enable delight digitally?
Here’s how we can make delight in this example:
- Perform user research to understand what you customer wants to do and where hiccups have occurred.
- Connect the ticketing system to the email system to send the appropriate information.
- Connect communications along the way to your content management system to reuse content.
- Connect your CRM to these systems to further personalize the information your customer receives.
- Ask for feedback after the concert to see if you have missed anything or if customers have feedback.
And at Drive Digital, in our experience, while these steps are work, no stakeholder or development team has raised an objection to trying to create delight.
Want to make digital delightful?
Contact usWhat should digital not do?
As we tell all our clients, digital can do anything. Computers are capable of great things, like changing the world. There’s value in keeping humans in the driver’s seat of digital; this post we break down where digital should not play a role in changing the world.
Here’s tasks digital should not do for us
Create information on its own.
Digital should not autonomously create unverified, unsubstantiated information. As humans, we trust much of what we read and many do not seek out information that makes us think or presents a different point of view. And since we use information to make decisions – important decisions – creating information should be left up to humans. There’s value in using digital to aggregate information, process it, and see patterns, but we should make the raw information so we can share facts with each other. And to help combat the weaponization of information and misinformation.
Teach lessons and parent our kids.
We should allow our kids to learn from a computer, but the lessons and skills we are imparted should be created from a human. This can allow our kids – and fellow adults – to learn new concepts, stretch their critical thinking capabilities, get new life skills, and meet new people. We here at Drive Digital believe that empowering others to think better and more critically is our job as stewards of digital, and that’s a job we take seriously. We believe that the next generation should be smarter, better, and more equipped to handle the world and digital than the current one.
Enact policies that affect real lives.
As tools, digital has the power to affect lives – whether intentionally or not. But digital should not create rules for our lives without our permission or understanding. We should make tools easier to create new policies and make it easier for everyone to understand them and their impacts on us, but they shouldn’t choose the new rules or incorrectly summarize them for us. These core human values we should learn from our experiences from others, and digital should help us guide us in helping us get to the best state possible for us and our neighbors.
Choose our interests and our professions.
The internet is full of helpful information in many forms: for example, YouTube has many informative videos that teach great skills. Sites like these do a great job of displaying information from experts. However, a computer doesn’t have the intelligence or prudence to choose how to edit information or decide what we should invest our skills and future in. This task should be left to those who are trained to do so, like trusted friends, teachers, and mentors. Digital tools can augment the skills of these people, but the agency of us figuring out our drive should be left to humans.
Make medical choices for us.
Digital tools and modern medical devices are great tools to help us understand our health and what is going on in our bodies. These digital tools should be praised for making healthcare more approachable and better. For example, the advances in AEDs (automatic external defibrillators) have made it such that the average person can save a life. We here believe solely relying upon digital for medical knowledge can lead to problems, and that should rather be left to a conversation between you and your doctor. Having agency in your medical choices and knowledge should be left to us humans.
Decide our financial standing in life.
Digital tools can easily move money from one location to another. They can also tell us how well the market is doing. While moving money is easy, getting money without working for it or a computer deciding autonomously deciding what your money does is something a computer shouldn’t do. Building digital tools to empower us to make smart moves is a great use of digital, but moving that money should be done under the guidance of a human or an authorized financial consultant.