My Greatest Professional Failure
Some years ago, I worked at a (very) conservative online outlet and magazine, The American Spectator. I was essentially in charge of all…
Some years ago, I worked at a (very) conservative online outlet and magazine, The American Spectator. I was essentially in charge of all things digital, photography and video. I was sold on the opportunity as a chance to recreate a digital presence for an established brand with a long history. So what it sounded like was a startup that had a ton of branding and marketing advantages. And their website looked like this.
I had redesigned websites before, in fact, this was the fifth relatively major redesign (and data migration) that I project managed. I felt like I was ready.
And I was totally wrong.
My Comedy of Errors
I set off on the right foot. I secured very talented visual designers, created a brand and style guide to make future design decisions easier, I was reading tons of articles on best practices, the direction of the web and how to lower the barriers between our audience and our content. Despite all of this, we saw a 10–15% drop in traffic the day we launched the newly designed site and we never really saw that bounce back. Beyond that, we were internally divided, our editorial staff hated the site and it frustrated them at every turn. So what did I miss?
Not Enough Thought about our Audience Identity: I hadn’t considered my audience nearly enough. I did some user testing and surveys. The results from those were encouraging in that our audience seemed to be asking for the direction we were heading. However, I didn’t think enough about who our users were. In short, they were old, white men who were never going to prize aesthetically-pleasing visual design over the comfort of the experience they had grown to love over years of visits. Undoubtedly, some wish-projection was happening. I wanted our audience to desire better design
Using the Right Metrics: For the Spectator, the end-all be-all metric was page-views. In some ways, this made sense as advertising dollars were essential. However, I never properly defined our metric goals. We did see a growth in engagement, as measured by time on site and pages per site visit. Engagement is what’s needed. But I never made that case and generally didn’t define success at all.
Not Attaining Internal Buy-In: I was told and I believed that I had full authority over our digital redesign. However, that didn’t really matter when the other portion of your internal stakeholders (in this case, editorial) is so crucial to your success. Editorial created our content, one of the keys to driving traffic on the redesigned site was more content and rotated content (based on popularity) by the editorial team. However, since they were never fully on board with the redesign (and frankly, didn’t love the typography, among other items) they never felt a vested interest in making the redesign seem like a success. In short, don’t alienate the people you need, even if they’re wrong in their design critiques.
In the end, these things and some others sunk the effort. They’ve redesigned their site yet again since my changes, I can’t say I hate everything they’ve done to be honest, but it all could have been better.
For the record, here was my version of the site (with the wrong Typography of course)
