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Brand Guidelines Are Ruining Your Website

Brand Guidelines Are Ruining Your Website

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Why print-first brand systems break online, and how to push back without demanding a full rebrand. I've been grumbling about this one for years, because although almost everyone now meets a brand through a screen, we're still handed identities designed for brochures, business cards, and the occasional exhibition stand, and then told to make the website behave itself. So this month I have a proper rant about it and Marcus does his best to talk me down, which he largely manages. We also get into top task analysis, which is one of my favorite research techniques, and the free app I've built because I got fed up running it the hard way. App of the Week Top Task Analysis is a free app I've built to make top task analysis considerably less painful, mainly because I'd spent years running it with a spreadsheet, a survey tool, and a fair amount of swearing. How top task analysis works Top task analysis is a technique Gerry McGovern came up with, and it works a bit like a survey except that it stops people from being greedy, because an ordinary survey hands you a long list of everything your users say they'd quite like and no sense whatsoever of what they'd actually walk over hot coals for. This forces them to prioritize, so you end up knowing which small handful of things the majority genuinely care about. Gerry's classic example is the Microsoft Office knowledge base that kept answering more and more questions and kept watching its satisfaction score slide, because the answers people actually needed were buried under a hundred they didn't. I use it for all sorts, from shaping information architecture and working out which objections are worth answering, through to prioritizing features and deciding what has earned its place on a dashboard. Roughly 80% of your users want about 20% of what's on your site, and this is how you find the 20%. What the app does The reason nobody runs it as often as they should is that it needs at least 2 rounds, one to gather the tasks and another to vote on them, so the app handles both in a single pass. You seed it with a starter list from AI, from the client, or from whichever stakeholder shouts loudest, and it genuinely doesn't matter if that list is a bit rubbish, because visitors can search it, pick the 5 tasks that matter most to them, and add anything that's missing, which then appears for everyone who arrives after them. A second screen asks them to put their 5 in order, and the back end lets you see the lot, merge the 14 different ways people phrase the same task, and tidy up anything unhelpful. And yes, there's a profanity filter, because I have met the internet before. Marcus made the good point that you want a segmentation question alongside it so you can see top tasks broken down by audience, which is already in there, and he also dug up a hospital trust site we worked on years back where we dropped the top 8 tasks straight under the main navigation. They're still sitting there 8 years later, which either says something flattering about the technique or something less flattering about how often that site gets touched. Give it a go It's free, because I did think about charging for it and then couldn't be arsed, which is not the sharpest business decision I've ever made. Have a play and tell me what's broken. The app: Top Task AnalysisThe step-by-step guide: Top Task Analysis: A Free App And Step-by-Step GuideFeedback: paul@boagworld.com When brand guidelines fight the web Most people meet a brand through a screen these days, and yet the web is still treated as the place where you paste in whatever was designed for print. A branding agency mocks up a homepage that has never met a real sentence, the guidelines get signed off after 18 months and roughly all of somebody's political capital, and then some poor soul is handed the job of protecting it, at which point they'll defend an unreadable contrast ratio to the death because it's sitting on page 47 of the PDF. Consistency matters and I'm not arguing otherwise, but being consistently difficult to read isn't much of an achievement. Marcus agreed with the general complaint and pointed out that Headscape has described itself as a brand interpreter for digital for something like 15 years now, for exactly this reason. He also told the story of a charity working with deafblind people whose shiny new sub-brand logo failed color contrast checks, and if I'd invented that example nobody would have believed me. A brand should serve the organization and its audience, so the moment its rules make the website harder to use, those rules need to change. What a brand actually is A lot of the confusion comes from shrinking brand down to a logo, some colors, a typeface, and a photography style, when all of that is really just the clothes the organization turns up in. The brand itself is closer to a personality, made up of what the organization believes, how it talks, and how it treats people when nobody important is watching, and your copy ...
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