It just occurred to me as I spent my Sunday morning taking my daughter shopping. I don’t like crowds and we got there around 9:00 that Sunday morning. Nothing was open. No food services were open save that of some coffee shops like Costa and Starbucks. Everything else was closed tight even though people were walking around going about their business.
It irked me that not only could I not get something to eat, but just how unprepared and frankly uninterested they were in making money. I mean why come in, start cleaning and preparing to open LATE, bitterly throwing away not only the opportunity to make money but the money its self. My sense of the stupidity of this was overridden by the shear sloppiness of it all. This is something that when working in the IT industry, (namely web development) is something that I am painfully too familiar with.
I have worked in this field for over 20 years, and have worked for small startups, large hughstreet brands and multimillion dollar companies and market places. The lessons I have learned in the pursuit of my career have been invaluable. Lessons in user flow, the art of leading the user through the required steps to have them arrive at the required location. More times as not this is a checkout or to part with information the company needs to make a sale.
Understanding your user
- What are the needs of your users?
- What problems would they like solved?
- What features are most important to them and why?
- What initial questions do they have about your product?
- What information needs to be provided in order for them to effortlessly interact with your product?
All the above are basic simple steps & rules that should be utilised when building an online campaign for any product or cause.
I am working with a very close friend of mine on a project, close enough to be family at this point. We’re working on a movement’s goal is to secure independence for Scotland, but not going through a political party route. I won’t go into details here as that is not what I am writing here for.
In our efforts to do this we have met and worked with a variety of other groups and movements.
And I want to go on record on this matter and say I have nothing but respect and admiration for all of the wonderful people involved in every one of these groups and movements.
That being said, I do believe they are, much like the closed stores of the shopping centre I have previously mentioned. They have a sign up website and a secondary website that is filled with information painstakingly gathered, and collated by well read academics. This being said they have committed errors and the fact (like the shops of the shopping centre) they are not only not addressing them, but they seem completely oblivious to them. That or just too ignorant to listen to people that know better. I honestly believe that they have fell into the same trap that I have seen so many others fall into.
The first mistake I see is giving the job to a friend to get on with it. Not entrusting a job to a friend is not in its self a bad thing. But when you have a job and a purpose you need to put all friendships aside and get the right people in to do the job as the product/cause is the main goal and should always be the main focus.
I have in my time, had to clean up after people who made the project all about them and about how clever they can prove themselves to be. Every time this fails and normally in the worst possible way, and normally at the detriment to the cause or company they were put in place to benefit.
This lot have not only screwed up the basics but have doubled down and set up AWS hosting. Now I have used AWS hosting in the past, but for simple non scaling signup site, and an information website? No this is totally the wrong way to go and anyone with any experience in web development should have thought about this. Even if it’s only from a financial point of view hosting non scaleable website like these are.
A running theme in my life is that, despite being a developer with over 20 years experience in developing websites. It never ceases to amaze me how almost every time everyone assumes they know more than I do. Regardless of my experiences in working in large companies developing branded websites and working to heavily elaborate scopes to keep to company and product guidelines, every client assumes they know design better, that they are somehow better at graphic design and know user flow, functional and non functional requirements better than I do with my 20 year experience.
And people wonder why I fucking hate interacting with people!