The Reign

As I told you before in my last post, I want to talk about website design. Since the reign of e-commerce nowadays is spreading like a virus and start to gently migrate every single individual to become both seller and customer in this online business. So this is a good topic for people who just launched or just get prepared to roll on their e-commerce website.

The design is a creative field that comes up when we need to make something better, solve something better. Let's say we have an old physical book that contains a leather-made cover, dull paper, and unique book's scent. But for now, like Amazon did, they made virtual bookstore so that we can enjoy our book digitally. We start to live in a paperless world and read way easier.

We need to take the bus, subway and walk to take our feet to the market. But now, we only need our fingers and a few minutes to check our grocery list. This reign will keep rising and perhaps in the future, we will rarely need cash to purchase something. We do the online transaction, buy online, sell online, and make a whole new system.

They said, "The world is always changing."

The world is like a big computer with tons of software. We update the software every single second we have in our life. In a changing world, we have to stay aware and adaptive. Your team, your store, your website, and your website design as well.

The Change

You need to change website design periodically. Even for small business perhaps need to change the content every single week. Sometimes you need to replace the images with words, videos, banner, or just leave it blank. It depends on the situation and what your customers need and want.

To make a change sometimes you stumble to a lot of ways to get ideas. One of the popular, yet effective ways to get ideas is brainstorming. But sometimes we don't do it right. We keep telling ourselves that we already have the great ideas but we miss the other opportunities. That's why I will explain the problems we mostly encounter and the antidote to close those leaks.

The Effective Brainstorming

Here are a few things from Adam Grant that wrote books like Originals: How Non-Conformist Move The World and Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success. Adam is one of the top-rated Professor in The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. So we can say that he is one of the genius and creative individual out there. And lately, I got hit by his article in Amazon Marketplace about how brainstorm could be so much effective. The article title is Brainstorming is Broken. Here is How to Fix it.

Ah yes, before I explain more, brainstorming is a group creativity technique by which efforts are made to find a conclusion for a specific problem by gathering a list of ideas spontaneously contributed by its member (Wikipedia). And here is a few thing you could implement when your team jumps to a brainstorming session to find awesome ideas for making your new website design.
Production Blocking

Adam said that everyone can give ideas. Whether it will make your team clap their hand or just put a smile on their face. Production blocking is making some people couldn't tell their ideas during the brainstorm session. An introvert person or the people who don't have as much status in the room might get low self-esteem and choose to not say their ideas. Perhaps they think that they are not capable to say the ideas and they are not credible to take the credits.

If you are going to brainstorm the ideas of your website design, then you should let every talented individual, even for the introverts and shy people to say whatever that crosses their minds. Hence, if you let them at least say their ideas, the production block will fall down and you can make an awesome website design.
Ego Threat

People always choose the most creative and the most unconventional ideas to put it on a project. But this strategy has some leak. When we do brainstorming, people tend to keep their ideas on the board.

Adam said, "Nobody wants to look stupid."

The ego threat sometimes makes you missed the most effective ideas. Even it's unconventional, it doesn't mean that the ideas you picked will lead you to success. after you close the opportunity to lift up your own ego, it will ruin the entire plan to make your website design great.

If you are the CEO, keep your organization goal as the fundamental of your brainstorming, therefore, you can and you will deny your own ego and manage all of your team members to hear every argument when you eliminate the irrational ideas.
Conformity

If someone in your group said one of the best ideas and all other people set up their mind to follow that idea, then the brainstorming session will become more convergent, not divergent. If you need to find lots of good ideas for your website design, you need to avoid the trap of thinking convergently.

Adam Grant has the antidote to these three problems to keep your team creative and get tremendous ideas for your website design. And the name of the antidote is Brainwriting. The system is like this, you let people come up with ideas separately, and once you have all the ideas on the table you take advantage of the wisdom of crowds to judge which ideas are promising, and then you begin to elaborate on them.

And Adam also said that the best predictor of creativity is not quality of ideas, it's actual quantity. Hence, the brainwriting let your team write all the ideas they have and sort their favorite it from every standpoint. Furthermore, it's not the idea you rank first that will be the most promising. It's the idea that you rank second.

In conclusion, we can use the brainstorming and brainwriting strategy to get us ideas about how we initiate our website design and start developing the concept after we have finished. And we must let all the team members explain their ideas, focus on company's goal, and abandon the conformity. And also, it is just a matter of time to make your website design become epic.