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\f0\fs36 \cf0 Think about what\'92s important to you\
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Determine challenges. What is hurting?\
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We got them to understand.\
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Know what the organization is trying to do.\
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Intro\
	We launched the website, and nobody complained. Amazing!\
Problem\
Explanation of solution\
	Focus through core values\
	Spend time sitting around bullshitting\
	Have retreats\'97not shitty retreats; make it worth your while\
	Gather results; it\'92s hard to deny the facts\
	What are they motivated by? Fashion, analytics, cool-factor\
	If they\'92re not data-driven, tell them they can leech off your successes\
	Get training\'97even as an introvert\
	Free opportunities to network\
	Going to training is iteration\
	Getting to training is data-driven\
	Tie these back to our core values\
	Communication is a big core value\
	Try out our communication on each other\'97does this sound right?\
Outcome\
Conclusion\
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\pard\pardeftab720

\f1 \cf0 So, you\'92ve launched your website. Your website is live! There is copious data flowing through the tubes.\
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Your team looks like this.\
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Your department is all\'85\
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And your school is like\'85\
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That\'92s not how it happens.\
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So, you\'92ve launched your website. Your team looks like this.\
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And everyone else looks like this.\
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And your school is like\'85\
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And so now you\'92re less like this and more like\'97\
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The bad news is, it\'92s never gonna look like this.\
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But if you do it right, it can look like this (golf clap).\
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One big problem that web teams face when launching a much-anticipated new design is unmatched expectations. You see this every year with the latest iPhone launch. Apple is very secretive about their products, so all the tech press can do is speculate about what kind of changes might be coming. They look at their old devices and they say: what don\'92t I like about this; how can this be fixed? When Apple\'92s announcement finally comes, and it doesn\'92t address this reporter\'92s pet problem, they\'92re eviscerated. \'93It\'92s a death knell for the iPhone!\'94 they cry.\
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Similar things can happen when you put a new website design out there. If you don\'92t address each individual\'92s personal misgivings, it can be easy to be branded as a failure. Of course, this is highly unrealistic. The key to mitigating the expectations of your coworkers is to help them understand your values. They may still not agree with your choices, but now the onus is on them to find common ground with you.\
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Bridging this gap is not technically difficult, but it\'92s not a straightforward process either. Therefore, I\'92ve created a simple roadmap that you can follow to go from disarray to a comma-separated array:\
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1) First you need to determine your core values.\
2) Then demonstrate your core values.\
3) Finally, communicate your core values.\
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Let\'92s take this step-by-step: first you need to determine your own values. There\'92s no science to determining this. You\'92re going to need to figure out what\'92s important to you and your team. A strong, visionary leader can dictate core values, but in the spirit of teamwork, a group should find values that they all agree on together.\
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Have a retreat and get everybody out of the office and into a comfortable environment. Try to keep your group small. Don\'92t bring your whole marketing department into the conversation. These values should be tailored toward your web team and the way it works. Spend some time sitting around bullshitting. Throw a bunch of keywords up on the board, then try consolidating them into broader categories. We eventually found four that worked for us.\
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Strive to find values that will give your team a direction. You\'92ll be looking back at these for guidance. \'93Keep calm and carry on\'94 is a fine mantra, but it\'92s not going to help you achieve your goals.\
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Consider, for example\'85\
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\i\b (User-focused)
\i0\b0 \
What will help you settle political battles?\
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The World Wide Web Consortium, or the W3C is the standards body that governs the future of the web. There are a lot of powerful parties invested in what the web will look like in the coming years, and if you keep track of some of the forums, the debates there can get pretty heated. If Apple wants to create a new standard and Google doesn\'92t like it, how does the W3C decide who is right?\
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To address this issue, they created a priority of constituencies: \'93In case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementors over specifiers over theoretical purity.\'94 What that means is, they evaluate conflicts and say, is this good for the user? If it doesn\'92t matter, then they say, okay, well, is this good for the author? (That\'92s us, the web designers.) Then, is it good for the specifiers, or the parties invested in this new standard? And finally on to theoretical purity. So, in a frictionless world, would this be an ideal standard?\
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That means if something sounds good on paper, but is actually bad for the user, the user should take priority. Likewise, if a new standard is great for a specifier, like Apple or Google, but makes life hard for authors, the authors should take priority.\
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For the W3C, Utility\'97getting use out of HTML\'97is one of their core values, and the priority of constituencies is one way they ensure that HTML remains effective.\
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/*For us, it was championing our primary user. We\'92re trying to attract prospective students and they\'92re coming to us typically through our homepage. But our homepage was scattered with dozens of links for other audiences, such as current students, faculty, and even the community outside. All of these links were diluting the information relevant to a new student who could potentially pay us a lot of money. We determined early on that we were going to build a new site focused on these users.*/\
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/*In doing so, we were able to have a firm ground when we needed to tell someone no. And an added benefit is that we helped stem the declining enrollment, and attract 100 more new freshman than the previous year.*/\
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Examining your internal political battles may give you useful precedents for settling disputes.\
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\i Other ways to settle political battles:
\i0 \
Company Vision\
Priority of Constituencies\
Product-focused\
Sales-focused\
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\i\b Simplified:\

\i0\b0 Figure out what will help you achieve your primary goal.\
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Hotel Tonight launched in 2010 and offers their users a way to book a hotel at the last minute. They determined that one of the keys to their success was to make this process lightning fast. They tested their competition to find where the bar was set: popular competitor Priceline required 52 taps and took 102 seconds to book a hotel. Hotels.com required just 40 taps, but still took longer to complete: 109 seconds. By valuing speed, Hotel Tonight allowed their users to book a hotel from their app in 4 taps and a swipe in just under 8 seconds. Within a year, they were one of the top hotel booking services in the US.\
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For Hotel Tonight, speed was a core value. They were able to increase value for both their customer and their company by paying strict attention the the number of required form fields and steps taken to book a hotel.\
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/*We needed prospective students to quickly learn about how things are different from other schools, how much it costs, how to schedule a campus visit, and how to apply. This information was scattered all over the site. Sometimes it was duplicated in multiple places and often the information didn\'92t match up. Important dates could be months or even years out of date depending on if a content owner had looked at a page recently. We were making it confusing to achieve some of the most basic goals of a prospective student.*/\
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/*It was clear that we needed to simplify, and we needed the site to stay simple over the long haul. So we wrote that down as a core value. Every time we simplify a new site section, our users have responded positively, and our live tests show that they\'92re more easily able to find the content they need.*/\
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Revisiting your primary goal may remind you about the value of your users\'92 experience.\
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\i Other ways to achieve a primary goal:
\i0 \
Compelling\
Interactive\
Fast\
Always Be Closing\
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\i\b Iterative:
\i0\b0 \
Turn lemons into lemonade.\
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Wizards of the Coast are the makers of the world-famous Dungeons & Dragons franchise, which was first published in 1974. To keep the game fresh, and to address the wants and needs of their players, they occasionally drop new editions with new rules. Their third edition was extremely successful and with it you could create very detailed characters. You could say, a little too detailed. You could know exactly how well your dwarf can appraise the value of jewels, or how smart your half-orc is about linguistics.\
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When they dropped 4th edition, it was massively simplified. This was polarizing to the game\'92s players; they felt it dumbed down the rules too much and made character growth too stale and predictable, and a bit too much like World of Warcraft. Before long, a copycat of their previous version was outselling the newer edition. Clearly they had misstepped.\
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For their latest edition, Wizards of the Coast literally went to their fan-base, outsourcing their play testing to actual players and getting feedback from them. They determined that, yes, players want a game that runs smoothly and simply, but the heart and soul of pencil and paper RPGs is the limitless and nuanced possibilities of your imagination. In the fifth edition you can still create your dwarven jeweler, but now you don\'92t have to actually know the jewel industry to do so. That fidelity to the D&D experience has created a new game that old fans have quickly come to love.\
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Marvel diversity?\
D&D fourth and fifth edition vs. Paizo\'97Fidelity\
	Put you on a track\
	Oversimplified the game\
	Took out one of the big reasons people play analog RPGs.\
New Coke\'97Classic (nostalgia)\
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/*We spent two years in a vacuum creating a flashy Admissions site that had all these crazy JavaScript sliders. When we launched it, it was two years behind best practices. We had taken so long to get it together that by the time we got it all out the door, we didn\'92t like it anymore. And it went beyond mere taste, because it was so fragile that it was difficult to make updates without breaking something.*/\
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/*We learned a hard lesson there, so for our next big update, we decided we weren\'92t going to keep the project locked away in a tower with a magnificent curtain reveal. We were going to do it iteratively. That means putting out bits of the site a little bit at a time.*/\
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/*In this way, we were able to get fresh, new pages in front of prospective students without worrying about our HR pages being in the new template first.*/\
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Hard lessons are a good way to see what didn\'92t work, and turn them into barriers against failure in the future.\
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\i Other hard lessons learned:
\i0 \
Respectful\
Honest\
Dependable\
Optimistic\
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\i\b Data-driven: \

\i0\b0 What motivates your boss?\
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Sony, divisions compete against each other\
Movie studio history\
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Maybe appearing fashionable is important to your boss. Maybe a constant marketing push is valuable to achieve his or her goals. Whatever it is that supports his or her leadership may be an ideal core value. We found that our boss likes to see cold, hard facts. When trying to convince him to adopt a new marketing slogan, we tested it against several variations using Google Analytics to find the one that was most compelling. That settled any misgivings about it real quick. Since then, we\'92ve determined that following the data is a great way to get quick answers to some of our questions. We rely on Google Analytics, but we also do live user-testing with a fancy setup, as well as informal surveys over the lunch hour. Based on this information, we rarely find ourselves in a position of wondering where to go next.\
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\i Other possible motivations:
\i0 \
Fashionable\
Cool\
Newsworthy\
Advertiser attraction\
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Relationships\
Analytical\
New Ideas\
Results\
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Once you\'92ve established your core values, you need to ensure that your fellow staff understand them. When we presented about upcoming changes to our website, we started the presentation by quickly going over our established core values. Then we referred to them whenever we covered a new topic to punctuate where these ideas were coming from.\
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For Evergreen\'92s web team, we determined the following core values: user-focused, simplified, data-driven, and iterative.\
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When we were determining which devices to support, we looked at our analytics to determine if responsive web design was necessary. We saw our mobile usage growing by a percent every month or so, and so we determined that yes, we should do something to address the growing mobile user base. This showed how our Data-Driven core value guided us.\
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When we looked at our old site on an iPhone, we noticed how much unnecessary cruft was consuming valuable space and attention of our primary audience. We found value in a mobile-first approach, and in Apple\'92s Human Interface Guidelines to light the way in simplifying the user experience. In this way, we showed how our Simplify core value guided us.\
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When we re-architected our primary navigation, we asked questions from the user\'92s perspective. Instead of asking ourselves if we thought a specific link fit within the primary nav, we instead approached it from the perspective of our primary audience. So instead, we asked questions like \'93Do these items meet the needs of prospective students, and if not, where might that be a better fit?\'94 This showed how our User Focused core value guided us.\
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Finally, when we tackled the details of pushing the new design live, we showed how our Iterative core value would get more new, better pages live faster than waiting for the entire site to be completed.\
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Really, you could say our fifth core value is communication. By presenting our core values to senior staff and later the rest of campus, we got our employees to acknowledge and respect the process we were taking in getting the new design out. Of course, our co-workers are still asking us to put their link on the homepage.\
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And that brings me to the best thing about putting these out there: we go back to this well time and again. When we\'92re approached about a change that we might not know how to handle, we ask ourselves how it stacks up against our core values. Is this good for the user? Can we expect good results out of this? Is this needlessly complex or duplicating existing content that can be linked to? Is this better than what we have? It\'92s not going to stop someone from getting mad at you, but it will make saying no to them a lot easier.}