One of our greatest professional challenges is getting out of our own head. As marketing and communications professionals, we use ourselves to stand-in for our customers or constituents. We say "I never click on ads" or "I only read email on my laptop", and assume that everyone else does, too. It's an incredibly human failing.

Yet we must resist this assumption. You are not your customer.

"Do You Like It?" is the Wrong Question

Never is this truer than in the fraught process of designing (or redesigning) your organization's website. In my web marketing and digital strategy work, I've sat through hundreds of design presentations. The designers talk through their work, and then warily ask: "what do you think?" or, even worse, "do you like it?"

And even if the designers don't ask these questions, that's what the client is mulling over. It's the most natural response in the world when presented with aesthetic work. But it's also the wrong one.

The right question to ask is "will this design serve the needs of my customers?" Will it enable them to buy the widgets you're selling, or learn about and act on the cause you're advocating?

Whether you like the colour scheme does not matter. At all.

The Logo is Fine Where It Is

Instead, surrender your personal taste. One of the main reasons you hired these designers was because you liked their work. That work is a reflection of their taste. Resist the temptation to ask that the logo be bigger, that they try it in baby blue or to make a thousand other requests that will water down a great site design into an ordinary one.

You should ask probing questions about their design choices. Frame those questions in terms of the target audience and how you expect them to use the site. Ask them how you can test their decisions using data from real site visitors. These are the hard questions, and the ones addressed by wireframes and workflows, not colour schemes and font selection.

But when it comes to font size and colour scheme, trust your designers--they know what they're doing. Also, understand that for most organizations, these aesthetics barely matter. Are Amazon.com or Craigslist pretty to look at?

That's why you need to pick the right designer. Back in theatre school, one of my professors used to say that directing was 70% casting. This is true with designers, too. If you pick the right designer, the design process can painless and pleasant. If you pick the wrong one, prepare for drama and delays. Awhile back, I wrote a checklist that will help you pick the right agency.

Web design is like fashion or sports--everyone is an armchair quarterback. We should actually treat it like carpentry or metalwork. It's a craft, and great designers are master craftspeople. Have faith in their handiwork.