Empathy · Principle 09 of 16
Work together to create empathy
Oli Gardner found out his own designers didn't feel respected, at a company whose whole product is a tool for designing pages.
I sat down with Oli Gardner at MozCon expecting to talk about landing pages. We did, eventually. But the story I remember is about exit interviews.
Oli had been reading what people said on their way out of Unbounce, then went and interviewed a pile of staff himself, anonymously, so they'd be honest. They were. One line he got back, as written up in the full interview on kwasi.com, was about as blunt as it gets: "Design isn't respected."
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09
Work together to create empathy
Get your designers and marketers on the same page first. Customers can tell when they aren't.
"I'm trying to bridge that gap and help people work together and develop more empathy, digital empathy."
> put designers and marketers in one room. brought snacks and a ceasefire.
Oli told me that marketers and designers can be pretty disrespectful towards each other, and he's trying to "help people work together and develop more empathy, digital empathy." I'd spent the season asking guests what digital empathy meant for customers. Oli pointed it back at the team.
The brief that gets thrown over the wall
You've seen this one. The marketer does the thinking up front, collects a bit of data, writes a brief and hands it on. In Oli's words, at 36:45, people are "just kind of being handed stuff" and "there's not enough collaboration at the beginning."
Then comes the standoff he acted out for me a few minutes later. The designer can't start without copy, so they wait a week or make something generic. The copy arrives. The headline doesn't fit. "I'm gonna make your headline short." "You can't do that. I wrote that headline." Somebody loses, and quite often it's the customer, who ends up with a trimmed headline and a value proposition that no longer says much.
We see the result of this a lot at Kwasi, when we audit sites built from the client's brief and not much else. I told Nathalie Nahai about one where people only ever clicked two buttons on the home page, while the content they wanted sat six levels deep. We moved it up, and as I said in that episode, getting the designers involved mattered as much as the fix.
Silos help companies scale, and that's the problem
Mike King sees the same thing at a bigger scale. In his big clients, he told me, the SEO team never talks to the PPC team, and dev only hears from SEO when something breaks. He reckons those organisations are built on the idea "that siloing is how you scale", which leads to "I do my thing, you do your thing. We talk every two months and we see what happens. But people don't behave that way."
His fix is practical. You won't tear down silos overnight, so put overlapping people in them: a developer on the SEO team who can walk between rooms and speak both languages. There's more of his thinking in my 2017 write-up with Mike.
Wil Reynolds reminded me that "when we're telling people to change a website, we're telling somebody that what you did isn't right." Worth remembering before the next design review.
Start together, sketch alone, decide together
Oli didn't just complain about it. He built a process, and he walked me through it. Everyone gets a piece of the research. The marketer pulls a report from Google Analytics. The designer runs some usability tests. The copywriter puts a survey on the blog and looks at heat maps. Then the whole team looks at what they found together and makes observations as a group.
Next comes sketching, which his team ran as a modified version of the GV design sprint. Everyone leaves the room with a big sheet of paper, sketches their ideas, comes back and presents. His summary of what happens next made me laugh: "90% of what you said is nonsense, but that bit is gold."
The payoff isn't only a better page. "When a marketer can see how a designer thinks and works and be included," he said, "they'll have more respect for them and vice versa."
Why customers can feel it
Pages built by people who don't talk to each other have a certain look. The headline says one thing, the hero image says another, and the button says "Submit". When Bobby asked Oli what matters most on a landing page, his answer was the clarity of your value proposition. Clarity is hard to get when three people are guarding three different parts of the same sentence.
If you want a shared language for the design side, Oli's seven principles of conversion-centered design are a good thing for marketers and designers to read together, then argue about.
If you only change one thing, invite the designer and the copywriter to the kickoff as well as the review.
Unbounce had six official values when I spoke to Oli. He also had an unofficial seventh, which he told me about at 12:49: giving a shit. His reasoning was that if you give a shit, every other value "becomes bigger and more powerful." Some people at Unbounce weren't sure about the word, which is why it stayed unofficial. Bobby thought they were being sheepish about their bodily functions.