Gez recently posted here asking ‘Does design matter anymore?‘
His case is that cutting ‘design’ can be a cost-saving measure. Using ‘design’ as a shorthand for ‘visual appearance’ and ‘style’, Gez questions specifically whether it’s worth paying extra to have the appearance of an app changed to perfectly match a corporate style.
I thought it was an interesting question to raise.
Design does matter of course.
The design of apps / software is fundamental. A ‘just-right’ design makes it easier for people to participate, results in a better user experience, and gets the best return on investment. The best design is the one that offers the best value – almost by definition. Anything else is either less than optimal, or just waste.
But when the basic design of an app is already good, is it necessary to do work changing it to perfectly match a specific appearance guideline? Nah. It’s just too expensive and not that big a deal. Consistency across an organisation’s websites is useful, but can be over-rated. People figure stuff out.
A perfect consistency might be desirable, but it isn’t necessary. It’s a luxury, a nice-to-have, and if (as some people are conjecturing) Peak State has passed, micro-managing the visual identity of an organisation shouldn’t be a spending priority.
The world of branding has moved on anyway. ‘Brand‘ is now understood much more as ‘what we do‘ and hardly at all as ‘our logo / font / corporate colours’. The traditional desire for tight control over visual identity doesn’t hold up – it’s too expensive and time-consuming.
Local authorities particularly will benefit from focussing on brand as ‘what we deliver’, not on ‘what we look like’. For hard-pressed staff it’s one of the easier cost-saving suggestions to implement: all that’s needed is to stop doing work to make everything fit to corporate identity / image. For management, officers and elected politicians, showing leadership on this issue is easy – just say “it’s ok”.
Back to changing the appearance of apps: well-designed apps have the built-in ability to make simple customisations. This makes customising some things very cheap. However customising stuff that’s not built-in is ‘really quite expensive’. This isn’t just for technical software reasons – it’s a question of value and designing for the total life-cost of a system; this would be useful and interesting to explore in future (doing it here would make this post too long) 
For large (national) organisations, it makes more sense to have apps thoroughly customised to fit in with organisational identity. Where there will be hundreds of thousands of users over time then a full customisation may offer good value. More so if users expect a highly consistent visual identity from an organisation and build their trust on this. Still, there could be real cost savings in doing without perfect consistency with other websites operated by the organisation (and in having a more relaxed approach to corporate identity guidelines).
What’s our position in this? We’re advocating that there should be less spend on customising visual appearance….yet as a builder of apps, customisation is a source of income for us, so in one sense that might seem irrational. Perhaps, but we want to be part of the solution not part of the problem, and we just don’t think this work adds value in all cases. We’ve focussed on offering built-in customisations that are good value, and we think they’re the future (or even the now).
I’ll get off my soapbox and end with a couple of helpful links. This useful list of best practice tips from Robert Brook makes for good reading. It’s based on a rather more cross list of ‘worst practice’ that Adrian Short compiled. Finally, Webcredible have a straightforward report suggesting that council website usability is getting slightly worse. Food for thought.
