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Strategy. You hear about it all the time. One must have a strategy/work on a strategy/follow a strategy and so on. Business types like to say “strategy” a lot as it sounds big, complicated and important.

And it is important, but there is no need for it to be complicated. Quite the opposite.

At the heart of it all “strategy” is just about having a plan for the thing you are working on. Or as Wikipedia puts it “a strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal”.

Getting the Strategy Right

If there is ever a time to look at what’s important in a project, it is early on, in the strategy stage.

Let us assume that your client doesn’t have a strategy for their next web project.

Before you build, design, code or write anything you need to think about what the project needs to achieve.

This is in part because strategy can mean almost anything, depending on the needs of the client, the size of their audience and ultimately the goal of your client. And it will mean different things at different times during the life-span of a project: you may have one strategy to launch with, another for the ongoing management of the site and so on.

Thinking the project through, seeing how one thing leads to another on the way to the project’s goal is a very healthy thing to do.

The one thing all strategies must have in common is that they tie in with your client’s overall business goals. (You’d be surprised how often clients themselves forget this simple fact!) If it doesn’t, the client will never be happy with your work even if they were the ones who ignored the business goal connection.

That’s why you should be thrilled when a client asks for your help in developing their web project strategy (or asks you to help them find someone who can create it for them).

It is an excellent opportunity to make sure that you, or the people you choose to collaborate with, create a to-the-point strategy that helps the client reach their goals and in the process makes you look like an absolute star who deserves lots more commissions. (more…)

Donating money to a charity should be as quick and easy online as it is to stuff a few coins in a collection pot on the high street. It should also be apparent what the money will be used for.

With these two things in mind, it is surprising how often charities miss the mark when it comes to their online donation screens. Fiddly pull-downs, peculiar microcopy, trillions of steps, and minimal transparency.

Here are some of our step-by-step notes and drafts from a concept exercise on behalf of a well-known charity. The goal was to create a screen that encourages more site visitors to give, and give larger amounts.

We don’t know if these ideas will ultimately be used, but they illustrate ways of evolving the user experience in a way that should increase the amount of money collected.

The starting point

(Disclaimer: we combined two screens in to one to have a truly poor starting point for the exercise.)

The centre of the donations page has the words “Charge me” followed by one drop-down menu with well over fifty options starting at $2.00 increasing by one dollar up to $30 and then in larger increments up to the $1000 mark. The second menu has only one option: zero cents.

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