If you’d like to decrease:
- employee productivity
- profit / revenue
Whilst increasing:
- staff turnover
- time spent at work
- amount you can claim back on tax
- revenue of your competitors (with view of one day joining said company)
Then I’d suggest you waste time on:
- the cosmetics of web sites that a user probably couldn’t care less (seriously, the attention span of a user is low, unless its facebook and its all about THEM!)
- designing emails
On the other hand, if you want profit and statistics to go up:
- provide the ‘useful’ elements that allow people to complete a task (eg. donate money)
- avoid boring news, announcements etc (Gerry says it all at http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2008/04/19/press-releases-spin-and-propaganda/)
It’s that easy but so many people get it wrong. It is rarely the fault of the designer too. Unfortunately the decision making often happens higher up from the ‘important people’ who value the internet and happen to have an opinion. When I say ‘important people’ I mean the people who employed you. I can only think of 4 things to do in such a situation:
- do nothing and give them what they want (paying customer)
- protest excessively (which will probably impact on your health)
- educate
- quit
I feel educate is the winner…
