Last Fall, I had the chance of working with a team of extremely talented creatives at Sid Lee on designing a content Website for Baby-Boomers. Interesting project, target audience and objectives, I couldn’t wait to see the site go up.

Last week, the Website went up. Now, if you’ve ever worked on a Website, you’ll know that launches are a bit funny. It’s easy to focus on the details, bugs and last minute fixes and miss the most important question: Does it work?

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With popularity comes responsabilities. With user engagement comes ownership. With ownership comes resistance to change. Facebook is a perfect example of this. Twice their design changed over the last year and twice it created an uproar. Petitions went up, groups were created and the Facebook team had to defend the changes.

But, if your business needs to evolve, what do you do?

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Although frequency has an impact on acceptance and usability (eg. dropdown menus are now used for navigation), it’s not because a solution is widely-accepted that it is the right solution for your site.

A standard comment form on blogs or news sites often looks like this:

Now, have you ever stopped to wonder if this is the right design for your site? In any design process, it’s important to understand why a certain design was chosen and benchmark alternatives. This, in turn, allows you to create a solution adapted to your site objectives.

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You don’t control the market, you don’t control the economy and you don’t control what people will or will not want. The only thing you control is what you do. How you identify opportunities in your market or how you react in tougher economic times is in your hands. The economy will probably not get better in 2009. Some companies are directly impacted while others are getting ready for the worse. Now, what can you do?

Much has been said of Kellogg’s growth through the Great Depression to become the market leader. Their idea was simple; other companies were cutting marketing budgets so they increased theirs. The reality is quite surprising; more people get rich in recessions than in easier economic climates. But, this does not mean that you should invest just anywhere.

What should you do?

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For the last few months, I have been doing contract work at Sid Lee, a big advertising agency located in Montreal. Sid Lee has a very impressive client list including Adidas, Cirque du Soleil, MGM and SAQ. Their main offering is Commercial Creativity^TM which includes branding, Web design, print, architecture, product design, etc.

The bulk of the mandate have been creating the information architecture and interaction design for various Web, email and mobile projects for clients including Toursime Montréal, STM, Red Bull, Créa (Infopresse), etc. The role at Sid Lee is being the usability go-to guy for designers and copywriters.

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