There is a tendency with most creative people I know to aspire for the approval of peers. This is natural, as we are all insecure and desire encouragement from people we respect. But it is possible, and often the case, that our peers have different values to our true audience. Chasing the approval of peers can compromise the success of a creative project.
Musicians playing to musicians
To help illustrate the point – this type of conflict is clear within localised communities of musicians. I used to occasionally watch bands play at venues in Durban and I would imagine that what I noticed occurs elsewhere. I would guess that almost half the people in the audience were musicians themselves – they came to support friends or check out the competition. This led to the bands writing and performing with the primary goal of impressing each other. Songs ended up being too complicated and progressive to be ‘radio friendly’. Needless to say, few bands broke out of the local scene.
Negative influences in software design
I design web and mobile software. I elicit requirements, sketch ideas, build prototypes and design interfaces. Throughout the process, there are points at which the user experience can be compromised because of the desire to impress stakeholders other than the users themselves. Much has been said about User Centric Design from a methodology perspective, but not from the psychological or emotional perspective of the designers themselves.
Say I have a fixed time box of 2 days in order to deliver a design for a new interface. My clear goal is to make sure that the limited time I have is spent on addressing the user’s needs through my design. The following examples illustrate how influences from peers and other stakeholders can conflict with this goal.
Designing for designers
As a designer, I often feel inspired to include novel aspects in my designs that I’d hope to see mentioned on blogs, Twitter or generally earn me kudos. I also feel obliged to keep graphics pixel perfect and mark-up spotless. Although valuable, this time could often be better spent elsewhere.
Insecurity
I frequently run designs by fellow team members for their input. Many developers love seeing their code ‘bling’ on the font-end, and will often suggest elements that I would deem low priority considering time constraints. It is often difficult to oppose these suggestions without seeming arrogant or defensive. This is an issue of insecurity and designers need to be bold about their convictions.
Unfounded client input
Clients are usually the least well educated when it comes to what is important in a design. We recently purchased a hilarious poster from The Oatmeal, titled “How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell”. The comic does an excellent job of illustrating how input from a client can ruin a design. Standing up to inappropriate suggestions from clients can be very tricky. I try to make clients aware of these possible conflicts at the outset, clarifying that it is our job as designers to keep the users’ interests in mind.
Simply being conscious of these influences can help you to always keep the users’ goals in focus. Unfortunately though, certain personalities can make this very challenging.
Software development is human centric and heavily reliant on effective communication. I sometimes wonder if we shouldn’t have psychologists in our development teams.
In 2004 I registered Clyral as a company. Believe it or not, this was after much thought and debate over an appropriate name for the organistion. I have been asked many times about the origin of the name and so decided to summarise the story here.
Creating a new word
Contrary to what most people assume, there is no witty formulae from which the name ‘Clyral’ was derived. No, we did not combine letters from our names with star signs or mothers birth dates. At the end of the day we wanted to register a short punchy dot com website domain that matched our company name. Unfortunately almost every word in the English dictionary was already registered by 2004, together with millions of combinations, many of which we tried to register. Although this limitation was real, the company was very much about creativity, and it seemed fitting to create a totally new sounding word that we could own and could be our identity.
Inspiration
The name Clyral was inspired by two science fiction character names; ‘Kal-El’ (Supermans birth name on Kryptonite) and ‘Klorel’ (An alien character from the Stargate SG1 TV series). If you are a Stargate fan, or bother investigating, please ignore the fact that Klorel was an evil parasitic alien. There is intentionally no inherent meaning in the name Clyral other than what we imply through who we are as a company. If you desire some significance in the name, we would rather borrow more noble virtues from the character of Superman.
Pronounciation
We are fascinated by the many variations on the pronunciation that constantly emerge, especially considering the diverse languages and accents we are exposed to in South African call centers. Clyral is correctly pronounced klahy-ral (kla?’ ræl).
Like most off the shelf software products, Ecommerce packages, whether proprietary or open source, can be very affordable and feature rich in comparison to entry-level custom developed solutions. The compromise with these packages however, is inflexibility in both design and process and usually an overwhelming management interface.
Are standard eCommerce package features appropriate for all types of eCommerce websites?
To their credit, these commercial or open source eCommerce packages do make powerful features very accessible to small businesses and are usually well built on the front-end; taking advantage of interface patterns we are all familiar with from sites like Amazon.com. Unfortunately, most businesses starting out on the web do not require the advanced administrative or customer capabilities offered, nor have the product range necessary to make an interface like Amazons at all useful.
Because packages have been created to try and cater for almost every kind of online business, they usually provide a surplus of unnecessary features and it becomes very difficult for an administrator (or shopper) to find their way around tasks which should be very basic. And if the management interface is not simple to use, then administrators will be unlikely to give their system the attention it will need to be successful.
Further to this, a well crafted internet strategy may often involve site structures, processes and interface elements that are not provided within package defaults. When provided with a rigid structure, it is inevitable that your strategy will be defined more by what is most feasible and less by what is most appropriate.
Is the saving in cost worth it?
This depends of course on how much you are paying. As a ballpark estimate, I would recommend a budget of about USD 10,000 to build a customised eCommerce website with standard components such as product catalogue, shopping cart, order management and credit card payment processing. It could certainly be done for a lot cheaper, but this budget would allow for a lot of creativity and design. This investment could go up 10 fold for more advanced custom systems, but for the average new online e-tailing venture, somewhere in the region of USD 10,000 is reasonable.
Let’s put our recommendation next to the alternatives and compare prices and flexibility. Note that flexibility is inversely related to the cost of growing the system if it moves out of the base structure provided – making custom changes to a complex system is expensive.
(These guidelines are estimates based on our current experience in the industry.)
| eCommerce Website Type |
Investment | Flexibility | |
| 1 | Custom Developed Solution | Highest >USD10k |
Very High (Easy to change) |
| 2 | Open source implemented by designers. | Medium >USD3k | Low (Expensive to change) |
| 3 | Commercial hosted/rented package. | < USD 200 per Month | Very low (Expensive to change if possible at all) |
| 4 | Open source implemented internally. | No cost (Time only) | Low (But no external cost) |
It is hard to compare these very different solutions but the above table does give some idea.
- Option 4 (Open source eCommerce package implemented internally.) does give low flexibility, but this is less significant where internal employees (or a one man band) can spend hours working on the system as the cost is far cheaper than outsourced development. This does however require a broad skill set in order to get strategy, copy, design and development implemented well.
- Option 3 (Commercial hosted/rented eCommerce package.) is one that seems the most affordable outsourced solution, but it is also the least flexible from our understanding.
- Option 2 (Open source eCommerce package implemented by designers.) seems to be very popular among small South African businesses who outsource the customisation of these systems. Many of these sites stagnate or require re-investing in new custom systems where the business’s strategy has been compromised by a rigid structure.
- Option 1 is our recommendation for most small businesses with a focused product range or for larger companies who need their online storefront to tie in closely with their existing business processes.
Concluding this eCommerce website comparison
Understandably, new online businesses usually have very little money to invest in their website design and setup and are looking to start off small. Unfortunately, ‘small’ has got to be ‘big enough’ in order to make an initial impact and win over your customers trust.
Although sometimes a business may find it’s ideal solution within the structure of a commercial or open source eCommerce package, and even when there is compromise the cost saving might outweigh the inflexibility, we have found that in our experience bundled eCommerce packages require more customisation and ‘breaking’ than it would require to build a focussed solution from the ground up.
Perhaps what is most significant is that new businesses deciding to implement a standard eCommerce package will not usually put sufficient thought into designing a customer experience suitable for their specific products and process. This is often because they adopt the standards provided with the package. The role of expert consultation and careful consideration of your customers’ online experience with your brand, is essential for companies that are serious about taking their business online.
