Why Evidence, Not Consensus, Should Drive Your Next Website Redesign

Chances are, many of you reading this know your website needs work.

But frankly, even reading that sentence feels exhausting. It conjures up visions of never-ending internal meetings peppered with disagreements, compromise, and getting nowhere while your site falls further out of date.

Hit close to home? Often, communicators recognize their website is broken but have little idea how to fix it and even less energy to figure out how. They see problems such as an outdated design, poor navigation, or confusing content, but don’t have the expertise to solve them or lead a team of experts that do.

Furthermore, they can’t make decisions about a website in isolation. Changing a website’s design, navigation, or content involves input from multiple stakeholders, including executive leadership and other areas of the organization. Trying to wrangle input, manage organizational politics, and align diverse groups of stakeholders is an exhausting proposition even if you have the digital expertise to implement the changes that come out of this process.

The result is you get nowhere. Meanwhile, the website gets worse and worse until it attracts an organization-wide push to fix it.

Even when there’s organizational momentum to fix the site, conflicting opinions and internal politics quickly create gridlock. Departments have different goals and priorities for the site based on their needs. Internal discussions quickly become debates where people advocate for their own priorities.

As a communicator, you are stuck in the middle trying to mediate this debate and manage opinions and egos. Rather than functioning as a strategic leader of the project, you end up trying to make everyone happy and force consensus to move the project forward. That consensus looks like a messy compromise dominated by the loudest or most senior voices in the room. Instead of a strategic leader, you’ve become a referee.

When a website project is reduced to internal opinions and compromise like this, two things happen.

First, you lose clarity. A website navigation created through messy compromise is more of a reflection of your internal politics than the needs of your visitors. The very problem you set out to solve (a confusing site) is perpetuated by your organizational politics. Instead of creating a clearer site, you produce something that is still confusing, only in a different way.

Second, you risk solving the wrong problems. Internal opinions are valid but colored by bias. This includes availability bias (relying on the input closest at hand, rather than seeking representative feedback) and the false consensus effect (assuming your preferences reflect your users’). These biases cause you to spend time and money on ideas that may feel important to you or your stakeholders, but don’t move the needle.

In the end, this comes at a cost to your organization. While you struggle to get a redesign off the ground, your existing site hurts your brand on a daily basis. Members, providers, and the public leave frustrated. And you, as a communicator, forfeit the opportunity to be seen as a strategic leader and instead become a referee and project manager.

But communicators in this situation miss a crucial insight. The problem isn’t the complexity of website projects. It’s the approach. The communicators who break out of this pattern and move projects forward as strategic leaders are the ones that begin with evidence and then use that evidence to drive clarity and consensus among decision-makers.

They start by researching where their users are getting stuck and then use the voice of their users as evidence to break through internal politics and bring an objective perspective to the conversation. As a result, they identify the right problems to solve, align stakeholders around these problems, and are seen as strategic leaders that create meaningful change.

This is important because website projects only come around once every few years. Capitalizing on an opportunity to demonstrate strategic leadership is what separates the communicators who get promoted from those who remain stuck managing opinions.

If you identify with this pattern and would like to lead a website project with evidence instead of opinions, I invite you to consider Brooks Digital’s Website Strategy Assessment designed to help you with this process.