The IC3 Blue Train - A little journal about design, marketing, sales and other matters

Most people become irrational when planning their own website

In a previous entry about the danger of too much customer ‘centricity’, I mentioned a quotation that haunts me: “Don’t talk too much to your customers because they’ll end up getting what they want, not what they need”. I still haven’t found who actually said that first but, lately, it came back to my mind when participating into the design of a new website.

When you’re in the market for a new car, you sort of know what you need and you’ve a pretty good idea of what fits your budget. If you need is some no-nonsense mid-size automobile you’ll look at VW Golf models and at similar products from Peugeot, Fiat, Ford and so on, knowing what brands are reputable and what cars tend to break down more often than others. Now, what you need is not necessarily what you want. You may dream about owning a sleek two-seater like a Ferrari, a plush limousine like a Mercedes, or a bulky 4WD ‘Chelsea tractor’  like a Hummer. But you know perfectly well that a Golf or equivalent is what you’ll buy because it’s what you need and what you can afford.

Same thing for a new home. You know you need a three-bedroom house with a reasonable garden, a study for your home office, plenty of storage areas, a shed for your workshop and/or for your gardening stuff, and parking space for a car or two. You also quickly figure out what acceptable areas in town fit your budget. And you can see if a house seems well built and, with the help of a surveyor, if you can expect major repairs in the near future. This doesn’t stop you wanting also an additional cottage for visitors, a swimming pool, a tennis court and, like Mrs Bucket’s sister, room for a pony. But you know these add-ons are beyond your budget.

Now, websites. Most of us don’t have the same ‘traditional’ reference points as for cars or houses. Since websites have been around for less than twenty years, few people can tell a good site from a bad one. There are no yardsticks like a VW Passat, a Toyota truck, a solid red brick house, or a convenient family home. Few people can figure out what they really need, what audience they have to reach, and what they have to put up front in their website’s show window to attract visitors. Even fewer people understand what building materials and techniques make a site robust or flimsy, what features make it easy to explore, and how contents should be presented.

Yet, many want home pages looking like Tokyo by night, clever Flash animations, video shows and other gizmos without any idea of the underlying complexity to produce and maintain such follies. Because they lack reference points (and because there are still many ‘cowboy’ website builders out there who sell snake oil behind smoke screens), they have no idea of what are the right price ranges for websites. They want a Ferrari for the price of a VW Polo, or a ten-bedroom mansion for the price of a garden shed. That’s not very reasonable, is it?