The World Wide Restaurant
I am always baffled by the cognitive leap that people take when they start talking about the web. In the exciting world of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, folks abandon all of their previous notions and understanding of how people interact and operate in reality. They deconstruct their existing mental models in favor of a hodgepodge of loose ideas and emotions in order to make sense of a world where they have limited insight. Oftentimes, I find myself dealing with clients who believe that they can magically step onto the stage of the web without so much as a thought as to what users need from them. As their designer, it is my job to ensure that they receive thunderous applause instead of boos when the curtain is raised on their site, and in order to do that I often have to start by providing my clients with a framework for understanding the web development process. In steps The World Wide Restaurant.
Everyone has eaten at a restaurant. They understand how it operates, the ebb and flow of the meal and what they are supposed to be doing. Most people have not taken the time to understand how the web operates, the ebb and flow of user needs or what they are supposed to be doing. The World Wide Restaurant is a framework that I have developed for clients, which allows them to broadly conceptualize web interactions in terms that are instantly familiar to them.
Picture that you are going out for a nice French meal in Paris right next to the Eiffel Tower. You look around at a bunch of different places, but you decide to go to the nice place on the corner. As you walk in, the waiter guides you to your table and immediately brings you a large plate of spaghetti. You did not order the spaghetti, but the owner of the restaurant just had a vague sense that anybody who comes to his restaurant should get a plate of spaghetti. Sure, it’s tasty and well prepared, but it is not exactly what you had in mind. How satisfied do you think you would be with this experience?
There are thousands of websites out there that are just like this restaurant. They simply dole out heaps of spaghetti to anyone who happens to stop in. Oftentimes a user will check it out, but why would they stay unless they really wanted spaghetti?
When we are building a website, we are the owner of the restaurant. We have an idea of what the market looks like and how we want everything to look and operate, but we do not know exactly what our customers want. So, we take the time to evaluate our business goals and determine what we want to accomplish, and then we do lots of research to figure out what our customers want on the menu or from the website. Equipped with this information, we can then design an experience for our users that meets their needs and expectations, while also affording us a higher probability of success.
The beauty of this exercise is how quickly it shifts the focus of conversations with clients from let’s make the logo a bit bigger to what would our users want to see? It also helps when I am explaining that I really do need to take the time to conduct user interviews and build personas so I know what to put on the menu for our users. Perhaps the biggest benefit of all is that it establishes a level of trust between myself and my clients. In the same way the owner of the restaurant trusts his cook to make the right choices for the menu, the owner of a website trusts her developers to build a site that suits her users.
By providing my clients with a framework to understand the web development process, The World Wide Restaurant has already saved me tons of frustration and misaligned expectations between my clients and me. I hope that it can do the same for you.
