Let there be web divisions
We are still crunching numbers on the Web Design Survey—with over 32,000 responses to 36 questions, there’s a lot to crunch. But in one area, preliminary data supports what anecdotal experience led us to expect: almost no one who makes websites works in their company or organization’s web division. That’s because almost no company or organization has a web division. And that void on the org chart is one reason we have so many bloated, unusable failures where we should be producing great user experiences.
Ponder. No matter how critical the web experience may be to the organization’s mission, the people who design and build those mission-critical sites work in divisions that have nothing to do with the web, and report to leaders whose expertise is unrelated to web design and development.
It’s a startling fact with profound implications—and as such has gone unnoticed by the business community and press.
IT or marketing
From law firms to libraries, from universities to Fortune 500 companies, the organization’s website almost invariably falls under the domain of the IT Department or the Marketing Department, leading to turf wars and other predictable consequences. While many good (and highly capable) people work in IT and marketing, neither area is ideally suited to craft usable websites or to encourage the blossoming of vital web communities.
Competent IT departments handle a dazzling array of technical challenges requiring deep, multi-leveled expertise. But tasks such as equipping 20,000 globally dispersed employees with appropriately configured PCs, or maintaining corporate databases and mail gateways, don’t necessarily map to the skills required to design great user experiences for the web.
Large-scale systems expertise takes a different mindset than what’s needed to write usable guide copy, finesse markup semantics, or design an easy-to-understand user interface employing the lightest and fewest possible graphic images. Moreover, nimble development and support for open standards are not the hallmarks of large IT departments (although undoubtedly there are noble exceptions). Additionally, developers with a background in IT (again, with some exceptions) tend to create from the point of view of technology, rather than that of the user.
What about Marketing?
Organizations that don’t entrust their website to IT tend to hand it to Marketing. The rationale for doing so is easy to see: Marketing has been briefed on the organization’s business goals (at least for the next quarter), and the division is staffed by communications specialists who know at least something about writing and art direction. If nothing else, they know who to hire to write their copy, and they are comfortable telling the in-house graphic designers to make the logo bigger.
Like IT, Marketing has valuable organizational knowledge (plus certain skills) to contribute to any serious web enterprise. The leaders of Marketing, like the leaders of IT, should be frequently consulted in any web effort. But the skills of Marketing, like the skills of IT, don’t necessarily map to what is needed to create great web experiences.
For one thing, as anyone reading this knows, the web is a conversation. Marketing, by contrast, is a monologue. It can be a great monologue—for examples of which, see The One Show Winners or the AIGA Design Archives. But a monologue and conversation are not the same, as an hour spent with your windy Uncle Randolph will remind you.
And then there’s all that messy business with semantic markup, CSS, unobtrusive scripting, card-sorting exercises, HTML run-throughs, involving users in accessibility, and the rest of the skills and experience that don’t fall under Marketing’s purview.
If not them, then who?
Business and non-profit decision makers, for your users’ good, consider this request. Stop separating the members of your web team. Cease distributing them among various (often competitive) divisions led by people with limited web expertise. Let the coders, designers, writers, and others charged with creating and maintaining your web presence work together. Put them in a division that recognizes that your site is not a bastard of your brochures, nor a natural outgrowth of your group calendar. Let there be web divisions.
Tags: webdesign, webdevelopment, design, development, web divisions
Filed under: Community, Design, Standards, business, development, industry, project management
In our research on how to create successful experience design teams, we’ve found essentially the same result: the web team is vestigially located someplace in the organization where they are bound to run into conflicts and problems.
The good news is, in some of the more enlightened organizations, that’s changing. For example, at Washington Mutual, they have a separate e-commerce group which handles all the web experiences. Turns out to be a huge responsibility, but it’s paying off for them big time.
The rest of the financial services world is watching WaMu carefully and I expect we’ll see several others of the big players make changes shortly.
Looking forward to more of your findings…
Jared
Your post is absolutely dead on. Every company I’ve worked for (until now that I’m self-employed) has completely ignored the same advice from multiple sources–including me–that neither marketing nor IT is the correct spot to have web development teams. Unfortunately, I don’t think that this trend is going to change any time soon.
Cheers,
Dan
Marketing, “if nothing else”, is the one department that keeps the company focused on the customer.
I work within one of those rare web divisions (at least a web team by name). We are quite separate from our (IT/backend) internet operations group, but we are still part of a larger creative services/design group, which is technically still overseen by marketing and is ultimately not its own entity.
Within the world of direct mail/marketing, services groups tend to have to take a “shut-up-and-just-get-it-done” mentality. When I hear marketing it conjures images of Roman slave galleons replete with whips and drums for keeping time… I tend to view this area of design as a retirement home for designers who don’t mind the punishment, but not for someone in their mid-twenties such as myself, looking to flourish.
Here, very few Internet-related decisions are vetted by our team; an egregious and reckless part of our company culture that is ultimately causing our not only our Internet sales to tank, but the print side as well. This is certainly not our choice, and I wish our insight into being more flexible and dynamic would be taken seriously. It’s not enough to assemble a groups of web-heads and say, “Alakhazam — you’re a web group!”, there has to be a certain amount of trust and autonomy given to said team. Companies have to let the web professionals do their thing, and not relegate their web teams to being on staff simply for the sake of carrying out updates to websites…
Jeffrey —
I spent 6 years working in the web department of a large nonprofit org, and I agree wholeheartedly that any organization that needs to communicate/interact with customers, members or constituents — and is big enough to afford a dedicated web team — should have a web division.
I’d take it a step further, though: in this age of social software and enterprise 2.0, a lot of the innovation that’s creating competitive advantage for businesses, political campaigns, and nonprofits is coming from the web people — technologists, designers, IAs and other thinkers. In a web2.0 start-up, it’s a given that IT and marketing strategies will be informed by all the powerful mechanisms web people have come up with in recent years to facilitate collaboration, communication, connection. It’s understood that social computing and the “live web” have profoundly changed the game for just about any kind of organization, and that taking full advantage of these things is mission critical.
Everywhere else, though, IT and marketing departments (especially IT) are more likely than not doing things the way they’ve done them for years; they’re too busy and/or incurious to keep up with the changes. And in failing to evolve, they are likely making big strategic decisions that hurt, embarrass, hamstring, even doom their organizations. They’re certainly likely to be severely limiting the experimentation with social computing that any good web team will want to engage in these days.
So, in my view, organizations generally need not only a web division but a C-level decisionmaker who’s well-grounded in IT, marketing, communications, and web development issues — and who belongs to the tribe of people who are pushing forward the evolution of the social web. Organizations need a CIO who’s charged with strategic decisionmaking across all of those divisions, and who will lay out a path by which they can play well with each other.
I wrote something about this here; many others — Zack Exley for one, writing about political campaigns — have been doing the same in their own fields.
As Dan Skaggs said, this article is dead on. I’ve seen both marketing and IT folks try to master the web with horrible results during my career. I’ve learned that you should keep the web division as small as possible. On a medium to large company (we are about 150 employees) I wouldn’t recommend to have more than 3-4 people involved in the web department. We work that way with the web applications at my work and it goes very well. However we have problems when it comes to the website where we have a lot of people involved (sometimes 10+). We still haven’t published the new website and we started in late October 2006. Not working full time though… but it’s a slow progress anyway. I still haven’t found the perfect recipe for the web department when it comes to websites. People in general should be more aware that making good websites and web applications are a craft that one should not attempt to deal with without some extensive knowledge.
Nice article Jeffrey!
Absolutely spot-on. Over the years I’ve seen a lot of friction between IT and Marketing when it comes to the web and both generally have valid positions. You can also see it in the emerging overlap in the disciplines of product management and user experience design that’s creating a new role of ‘web strategist’. Here is an interesting conversation on the subject.
I work in a team that is a hybrid mutant of IT and Marketing. The two halves are from the different departments and it works pretty well, but the thorny issue of who pays sometimes crops up.
It’d be great to all be in one team, under one banner, but my only concern would be the danger of us retreating to our web design silo.
I have to say this is quite an offensive conclusion to draw from the survey. I’m impressed with your ability to insult 32,000 people all at once with one line:
These “failures” are coming from some of the better minded web professionals in the industry who are interested in learning–those that read ALA.
To say that having a specific web division is going to fix all the UX problems is to miss the nature of where these problems begin in the first place: a lack of communication between the end-users and the designers/developers.
As long as that lack of communication is there it doesn’t matter if you are in a Web Department or not.
Wow, that’s not what I was saying at all. I’m sorry that’s how you understood my comment—and stunned that you thought I was saying the people who took the survey make bad websites.
There are billions of websites out there, and presumably millions of people who make websites, few of whom (proportionally) took the survey.
I’m not saying that, either. I’m saying the lack of web teams at most organizations that have websites, and the dispersal of web personnel across (often hostile, competitive) divisions, accounts for many of the problems we see all over the web. A non-web-focused leader at the top can subvert or kill good work being done by web-focused employees—not because he or she is a bad person, but because the web is not his/her area of expertise.
I agree with you, and I believe that having web personnel work together in a web division headed by someone who knows and cares about user-centered design will help.
AMEN! You hit the nail on the head. However, like Dan pointed out, I dont think we can expect changes soon. The problem for me is that those in the superior decision-making positions lack knowledge of the web, in general. The only way we can get it right is to influence new and upcoming companies to “break the mold”. And this article is a GREAT place to start referring people!! Thanks, Jeffrey.
To Ben: He is talking about the resulting web sites, not the developers!!
Being a web designer at University, this issue is all too familiar. Our campus web development team relies on inter-department cooperation between IT, a Communications Office, and others. We’ve formed a “loose” bond between employees of 3 or 4 campus departments, but that bond depends on cooperation and enthusiasm, not so much the direction of our superiors. Come time for employee reviews, its hard to justify your value to the organization when your boss doesn’t fully understand your contributions.
On the other hand, the idea of separating ourselves from these various offices and forming an independent web development team in a silo, would invariably cause other problems. It’s much easier to get things done when respective members of the web team have direct access to marketing and IT decision makers.
Great post Jeffrey. Can’t wait for more analysis of the survey results.
Enlightening, thanks. Where I work, the Web Group is a subset of Advertising. I chuckle every time I have to bill web graphics development to “Prepress” because no other appropriate category exists!
Jeffrey,
I agree with your analysis. But aren’t you missing something out?
The company needs a web division, but it won’t be much use if it still gets overruled all the time by everyone else… it needs to have the authority to make important decisions itself. And that’s difficult to achieve when people like Marketing, IT, or the CEO are used to being in charge, and don’t see what’s wrong with their ideas for the website.
Ultimately it’s a question of politics.
@Jonathan:
Agreed, absolutely. To function adequately, the web division needs the same degree of autonomy and respect as any other major slice of the org pie. Its relationship to the CEO should be that of a respected consultant to a high powered client.
Jeffrey
Your post remind me of a recent experience I had with the revamped Bank of America Online Banking site.
A number of functions…did not function…for a reason…that you would not get unless you called them…
A frustrating experience indeed that prompted me to write about it on ‘Serge the Concierge’
Maybe just having real users test the site and be able to give their feedback would have done wonders.
Too empowering?
I do like your Event Apart playlist (Tom Waits and the like) by the way.
Have a relaxing 4th of July.
Serge
‘The French Guy from New Jersey’
Blog:
http://www.sergetheconcierge.com
Many large corporations in the UK and Europe have “user experience”, “new media”, “internet commerce” or some such department dealing with the digital side of the business. At least, I’ve worked with many clients who are members of such departments. I myself worked for a “new media department” at a large leisure magazine publisher over six years ago.
Is this an American thing you’re talking about? If it is, then take it from us here in Europe: having a web division is no guarantee at all as to whether your company produces good design on line.
I’m glad commentary about the Web Design Survey is starting to appear. I wonder if many organizations resist carving out a Web division due to lack of easily named management roles within such teams? I’ve worked a few places where the web team was separated in function, but reported to a Director under one silo or another because no one within the team had a managerial role or title. Rather than find additional management layers to build out a traditional division, the web team is slotted under the directors of IT/Marketing/Tech, etc.
Findings about managerial (or near-managerial) roles and titles for web teams would be interesting to a lot of people, if the Web Design Survey has anything conclusive about it. Lately there’s been a bit of blog commentary about CXOs—chief experience officers—and I’m encouraged that user-centeredness and experience design might gain some executive foothold. But what about the managerial levels in between?
Great post, Jeffrey; it’s good to get some early feedback on the survey.
All valid points, too. I think we’ve all spent enough time explaining to people with *zero* design experience why they can’t use fonts x, y and z, and why the site doesn’t look the same on their 2-way, Dick Tracey wristwatch web browser as it does on their 30″ desktop monitor to understand the need for a chain of command that understands what’s involved in building web sites that work.
Looking forward to hearing more.
Amen.
Very few places I’ve worked (or clients I’ve had) understand this issue. I’m glad to hear companies are starting to catch on though. Sooner or later, others will follow suit.
I once worked as a webmaster for a University that at that time, was the only University with a dedicated web team(as far as I know, in the Philippines). The difference is so glaring with other University websites, we were the only one with accessibility guidelines, and was a perennial finalist in web awards (ok, that may not be important)
The point is, we were ahead of other Universities because we have a web division already when others are contemplating on having one or busy outsourcing it to someone who may not understand that the academe sector has a different need compared to the business sector.
At my last job, I was in the Business Disseminations dept. (or something like that). I was regarded as pretty much the same as anyone else outside of the IT department. It was quite silly at times — being forced to use XML as a database (’cause they wouldn’t set one up for me), getting told-off for putting scripts on their servers — that I had been asked to develop by other departments or my boss.
The web is just too new. IT and marketing have been around for ages, and the web started from within them. I’m sure it will naturally change in a few years.
Designing the user experience shouldn’t only apply to the website, it should apply to all aspects of the organisation’s interactions: products, communications (written, verbal and digital), processes (internal and external).
… It’s needs to be part of the organisation’s culture. It needs to be driven from the top.
I say nay! to the web divisions, how can I sell my services if they do it themselves :)
I think this is a topic well overdue for discussion, but I also think we all need to take responsibility for its neglect. Compared to the amount of information there is about designing and building websites, or individual skill sets, there’s very little on managing web teams (let alone web divsions).
If I have one criticism (and I really don’t mean offence to anyone) it’s that I think this debate needs to be fostered by those working in-house, not agency side. In some way I think agencies are often used as a crutch to avoid the pain associated with these types of decisions/discussions, and I’m not convinced that there will be much real progress if solutions are only proposed by those who aren’t facing the everyday consequences.
If people are interested in carrying on the discussiona and perhaps broadening the remit, I’ve just set up a google group on the topic of web teams, so that we can have have a full discussion out in the open.
Ummm, why are the comments dated December 31st, 1969 at 3:58 pm?!
I’m going to forward this post to everyone I know. I work in a large association and while we have a “Web Team” in name, we’re actually just a small department in our Publishing division (recently moved from Marketing Communications). We have one developer who’s not allowed to do anything because of IT policies and we spend more time fighting with IT than we do developing anything new or innovative. Our IT team is hamstrung by the very reasons you outline and not real interested in the Web site. We’re interested in making the Web site better for our users but can’t do anything but change look and feel. I’ve been asking for a true “Web Division” for years, but I can’t see how this old school association will ever get it.
[off-topic]
@Josh Stodola asked:
Either the Kramer plugin has broken, or the Technorati database that feeds it has gone batty. Kramer now lists the dates of all inbound links as December 31st, 1969, at 3:58 pm. This behavior just started; I don’t know what’s causing it.
I refreshed Kramer’s cache and deleted all Technorati links (there were tens of thousands of them) but this did not help. Then I disabled Kramer, but the mis-dated inbound links did not go away. I have manually edited their time stamps to 2069, to at least push them to the bottom of the page.
Anyone with information on this bug in Kramer (or possibly in Technorati, from which Kramer derives its links), please share with the class.
[/off-topic]
Argh - if my feedreader had picked up on this earlier maybe my comments would actually be read…..
But again, being part of a “web team” who work within a marketing division I feel that its important to ensure that there is the proper support around the web team to ensure that they don’t end up becoming unsupported and pissed off. In certain companies I also think not sitting within IT can lead to people believing that actually they know nothing about there job!
Its also important that anyone recruiting actually has a good idea of the skills they need to ensure that they hire the correct people. Again I have found that marketting people will look for skills that are either outdated or not really needed; and not having the technical knowledge they won;t really be able to work out who is best for the job.
When it works I am sure its a beautiful thing but I am currently in a situation where things haven’t gone so well…..
I have worked for several corporations who did have a “web division”. But even then, the chance of producing “great user experiences” is often small because the actual influence on other divisions, on which the web division relies, is limited.
Hear Hear!
There seems to be this assumption that Marketing cannot talk Techy. I’ve worked in online since 96 and am now delighted to be Marketing Director of a financial information group, where I “control”?! the online site experiences and the offline activity, which increasingly is a complementary to the e-channel rather than the other way round. I can have conversations on style sheets, content management systems and ajax (etc etc) with the best of them, as well running offline events, portfolio management and brand work. A company’s website is a sales channel AND a service arm, but more fundamentally one of the most accessible manifestations of a company - and as such Marketing, when it’s doing its job properly, should absolutely be responsible for getting it right.
Having said that my previous role was running an online channel within the marketing division of a UK blue chip, where all my time was spent building recovery plans for the numbers we had missed because the marketing activity’s primary call to action was a call centre because that’s what We Understood. Our IT costs were extortionate and we had lead times of several years to implement content management or e-commerce solutions. So we were always regarded as expensive and unresponsive, and consequently disregarded. My ideal would have been to have worked as a start-up with my own IT and marketing resource, writing into the company’s systems where necessary to provide functionality, and grow from that basis.
Hear hear. Our corporate website used to be with IT and now it is with marketing. It means now though that the content people and the technical people are separated by the units we work in and by our location. Fortunately we have a good working relationship. Unfortunately we have practically zero budget for new developments and we feel as though we are the poor cousins to our publications and advertising counterparts.
My boss and I have been saying for 4 years that there should be a Web division and maybe in 10 years there will be. Here’s hoping!
Lasst 1000 Web-Abteilungen blühen…
Wer macht die Website im Unternehmen? Oder macht sie gar keiner, es ist nur jemand verantwortlich? Aber warum versagen dann so viele Unternehmensauftritte im Netz, warum mißlingt so oft die Markenkommunikation, warum ist die Usability so schlecht und warum kann oft von Barrierefreiheit keine Rede sein? Jeffrey Zeldman sucht eine Antwort auf diese Fragen in der internen Organisation der Onlineaktivitäten. Hier weiterlesen »
I worked as the sole Web designer for a large publication in a medium-sized city. In the 3 years I was there, my job, and therefore the Web site, was overseen (in succession) the print art director, then the company VP, then a sales director who couldn’t manage to save a gif to his desktop without assistance, then a project manager, then finally a section editor for the paper who thankfully understood the web and its importance, and ultimately freed the site from its position as the ‘bastard’ of the publication. I work for myself now, but am happy to report that the paper has a full-fledged Web department, respected as its own entity and less influenced by sales figures and editorial demands.
Mad props on your analysis of these findings.
I’ve been fortunate enough to work for organizations that have had established web divisions, but my experience has been that those departments are regarded as IT departments for the web, or website ‘administrative assistants’. Rather than tapping into what I’d consider the best authorities on everything web, senior management relied on marketing, communications and graphics departments firmly rooted in print, and then presented the web folks with plans and decisions made by those groups. So, even when there is a web division, it isn’t necessarily a whole division, where web marketing, web content and writing, and web design decisions are made. More often than not, it’s been a department tasked with implementing not-so-great decisions made elsewhere.
Well i have to say, i’ve been expecting these results.
I’ve never seen any well-strucutred Web dept. and unfortunately most of the times companies group toghether different people with very different low-profile skills working for “the web thing”.
Weird to say, but while the latest years have been spent focusing on terms like usability and customer-oriented services, the rest of the world still seems to ignore these concept exists. Or i should better say that probabily, including some “web-designer-to-enslave-to-do-everything” has been pretty much more useful for companies to “survive”.
I would also like to add that companies can’t afford an in-house IT crew outsource their web design needs to their marketing contact or their IT contact. It seems the underlying thought is that “a website is a website.”
How do we combat such issues as educating businesses that there is a difference between web designers, branding/art marketing firms, and IT consultants?
It’s not surprising to me that businesses and organizations underestimate the requirements of the web — I run into it almost daily. But then again, I’m in the trenches trying to give clients what they need instead of what they think they want. Too often, the difference between best practices and “what will work” is not obvious to the layman.
So sad. So true.
Let there be web divisions and peace in the whole world :)
“There seems to be this assumption that Marketing cannot talk Techy”
Sorry Kate but you’re displaying the exact problem right there. We are not ‘techies’, we’re specialist designers, engineers and developers who often program in over ten languages whilst marketing directors barely speak one.
We don’t spend years training and learning our profession because it’s easy, or you can just sling in a load of buzzwords like : “style sheets, content management systems and ajax (etc etc)”, and everything will turn out just peachy.
If you have no idea how a CMS works from the ground up, you have no business working as head of the web division. You have no training in design, don’t tell the designers to make the logo bigger. You have no training in Human Computer Interaction, don’t tell your developers to make the menu flash more.
In short, don’t be so bloody arrogant.
This article is pretty much like asking a lawyer whether you should take legal action. Guess what, they are going to say yes. Unfortunately if you knew a little more about marketing you would have know the conclusion of this survey before you bothered to collect any answers!
So okay, now I have taken you to task over a poor survey on a biased market, lets look at your conclusions.
1. The web site shoud not be run by IT. I actually agree with this! I would hope that anyone these days should be able to purchase a domain name and set up hosting. If you want to host yourself, you may need IT help, but lets face it the vast majority of us would just buy a hosting package. If you use someone like GoDaddy you can sort out linking the domain and hosting in about 2 minutes flat, with no experience at all. Conclusion - there is no reason why IT should be involved.
2. The web site should not be run by marketing. I agree that it should not be run by a marketing team with no interest in the web. However, marketing has changed and pretty much anyone in marketing is now more than interested in the web. Marketing are the one place within a company that tend to have the copy skills, the design skills, the ability to generate content, the vision for the website and how it fits into the whole marketing mix.
If the budget is big enough, separate people to do the web work within the marketing team are a good idea. If not, it is important that web design skills should be learned and kept up to date for new trends.
I am going to give you the example of one of our site, http://www.brenclosures.com.au. We changed the navgation a year ago to allow people to be on our site less time, and view less pages. Why, because our target market wants information on our products quickly and with minimum effort. Your comments about the web being conversational in our case is not true, they want info and they want it fast. Dare I say that you have assumed that your market is the same as mine, and in doing so you have made a mistake that is more likely to be made by a web department than marketing!
Conclusion - any marketing people worth their jobs are now paying a great deal of attention to the web and using it as a large part of the overall marketing mix. Some get it wrong, the vast majority don’t. You may not like how they design their sites, but if they want to survive these days, they better make sure that their customers do.
I work in a web division of a large University. I’m actually getting ready to start on a project redeveloping our central IT department’s web site because they realize its our strength not theirs.
We have our dysfunctions, and honestly the marketing folks have great ideas that we should solicit more often. We couldn’t live without our IT guys. But overall it’s a better model for a large organization.