We talked with Seth Giammanco about managing website and design projects.

Jami, Alright, everybody, welcome to our impactful projects and Planning series. I'm Jami Yazdani. In today's session, we're talking with Seth Giammanco about productivity. And so Seth is a principal at minds on design lab, a strategic design studio with digital expertise, and so Seth has led the creation of websites that are beautiful in their brand expression, easy to use and focused on conversion. So welcome Seth. It's great to have you here. Oh, thanks, Jami. Good to be here. Yeah. And so tell us a little bit about your work and your business. So what impact are you hoping to create for your clients? Right on, so we're, we're a design studio that does a whole breadth of different types of design work, from visual branding to organizational event campaign collateral, both print and digital to content managed websites.

And you know, most of our clients are again, small and mighty, often that means small and mighty organization, sometimes medium or larger, and a small team within it, but we find they're growing, and we want them to have a visual design that reflects the quality of the good work that they're doing. They want that too.

So it's a level up to how they're presenting themselves. And the idea is we're looking to boost their confidence and to create a situation where when they're having a conversation with a potential funder or community members, and those people go and visit their website or look at their annual report or get an invite from them, that those materials are reflecting the level of quality of the experience they were having and the conversations that they were having, So they're backing up those teams, and that's that confidence boost part and reinforcing the quality of that organization, and as a result, building trust overall, wonderful. Yeah, I love that focus on trust, and I do think, I think we've all been to organization websites where

you're not sure. You know, you imagine that they're doing good work, but you're not sure. And I think, in a world where there's, you know, a lot of scams, and people who maybe aren't aren't doing good work, it's we want people to trust us. So what would you say makes website and design projects unique or challenging.

I think a big part of it for all design projects, including the website, is you're balancing creativity and a creative exercise with a whole lot of different constraints. So for general design projects, you're thinking about

anything from what are the communication goals, brand alignment, to any existing brand materials, look and feel, to the classics of budget and timing. And with our working with nonprofit organizations, you know, we're generally working with tighter budgets while the need is still great and the desires are still great, and then on the website side of things, you're just laying around layering on a whole lot of additional constraints. So from creating designs that work on all sorts of screen sizes and resolutions, to performance, you know, making sure that pages load quickly and balancing that with the visual assets that you're using on a page, accessibility, making sure you know that you're using colors that have the right level of contrast for those that may have difficulty seeing that or reading materials and being sensitive to that, to the nature of dynamic content and content flexibility. So we're building sites on a content management system, and we want to provide flexibility to allow authors to tell their stories in ways that make sense for that particular page or blog entry or event that they're publishing. So when they're creating that, we want to make sure that our clients don't have to do any technical wrangling, but and get a great design so making sure our designs can be flexible. So they add an image here looks good if they add a metric block that showcases a number and an impact stat, you know, alongside that image, it looks great then, you know, in whatever combination that these things work. So it makes it that much harder to, you know, again, all with budget and timing and wanting to have an.

Nice, unique look. You know, we find that we often have to

work to kind of find those small creative details within, within a piece of work that gives it something that you a little bit of a unique flair, that plays with the brand, a little bit makes it shine, and that could be reused in a lot of different places to, you know, to kind of balance that out. Whereas not every page on a website could be designed completely uniquely and be in a tight budget or on a tight deadline, you know, a larger budget, yes, could have lots of unique layouts and pages, but, you know, working within those constraints is always the challenge. Yeah, it sounds like it actually. My first project I ever managed was a large website redesign project. I'm not a web designer at all, but we were transitioning from sort of one content management system to another, and we're using it as an opportunity to really scale down. And this was a library website. So lots like you said, constraints, lots of interrelated pieces, lots of folks who are going to need to make updates. And so, yeah, it was a large project, and I maybe still have PTSD from it.

That's interesting. We,

we find that it that's pretty common where,

whether large site to, you know, to even you know, smaller sites, sometimes, where, sometimes there is a tendency to make things more complex than they need to be. And those sites become really hard to manage, really hard to use. They generally, you know, they generally don't serve the need over time. You know, they might have at the time of launch, but over time, they become more cumbersome to to evolve and manage. And so the process of doing a little bit of streamlining as part of it. And again, that's a different type of website. Challenge is, you know, how do you how do you give flexibility, how do we address a lot of unique needs, yet still try to keep the back end and how a site is architected, you know, simple and streamlined as much as possible? Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I think we had something like 700 individual pages that you

scaled down, and some of them were out of date, but anyway, so thinking about all of the different stakeholders that we are often talking about, particularly in nonprofit projects, how do you facilitate collaboration in your projects.

Well, generally, we're working with a core team. Occasionally, we're engaging some folks outside of that core team depends on the organization and where they are.

Rarely and sometimes we've had experience where that outside collaboration is with with the board, which is always a challenge.

So

but you know, I think with the core team, I think the key part is establishing a culture of respect and trust, where we can equally share expertise, ask questions, challenge and have good dialog

and learn from each other as we're going so during the discovery process. For example, we want to learn from our client partners. We want to learn about the audiences they're trying to engage. We want to learn what their pain points are, what their goals are. We want to learn from their content, their programs, what is it they're offering? What are the key and desirable engagements while we're learning about that? Of course, we're injecting some of our own expertise and understanding so multiple touch points during that process to to have those types of conversations, and then as we move through the process, you know, providing feedback on designs, providing feedback on wireframes, and, you know, just having those open conversations during the course of the process, and being very transparent about

what type of feedback is helpful? How To Guide that, how to move forward, how to be strategic in our thinking, how to keep our audience members and personas in mind every step of the way, as well as being transparent and real about, you know, change requests and alterations and impact on budget and

and timing. So we're we true. See it as a true partnership, where sometimes a partner needs to say yes and or maybe even No, but you know, and.

Try to explore alternative approaches. If you simply just say yes to everything, there is a tendency to lead to those over engineered solutions that are hard to use and hard to maintain over time. So, you know, trying to, you know, to keep that streamlined and keep that conversation that we share that goal of creating a simple site together,

outside, you know, lots of different, lots of different opportunities. It really just depends on on the organization. But you know, we'll do things from surveys to sometimes doing presentations, sometimes recording video walkthroughs to share with other folks, to get feedback if, if there's something unique to a website that we might want to get some user experience feedback and like a little mini usability study. You know, we might create some prototypes and get some feedback that way from from the broader community. But with most of our projects being pretty lean. We're very reliant on working with, you know, the knowledge of the people that we're working with, and really leveraging that to get a good outcome. Wonderful. Yeah, it sounds like a

very, sort of, I'm imagining a very iterative process, you know, that there's kind of, it's not like, oh, we get some feedback at the beginning, and then you get a website at the end, and then you're, you know, saying, kind of what you like and don't like. And so, yeah, a lot of collaboration along the way, yeah. And it's, you know, in terms of, you know, project management approaches, we we tend to

as these are mostly project based efforts in terms in the website, at least the first build of a website, then, you know, maintaining it or evolving it over time is a little bit different. But we balance a bit of a waterfall approach, where we are doing a lot of thinking and a lot of planning at the outset with an understanding that we need some agility through the way. So we are going to do wire framing. We are going to write up a brief, and that's important, but we also have to leave room during the process for change, because as you you know, move from a wireframe, which is a like, you know, non polished outline or blueprint for what the site might be. Every time we show a full, full fidelity design, we get feedback that could have been given at the wireframe phase, but it just doesn't hit you until you see, you know, everything really come together. So, you know, that's natural. We need to allow for that, that to happen as we go, right? Well, it's interesting, because I know PMI is saying that increasingly people are using hybrid approaches. So there are definitely people using waterfall, you know, and it you absolutely have to do it in certain things like construction or whatever, but, and there are some people, probably in tech that are absolutely using Agile or iterative, but most people are doing some blend, right because our projects increasingly need some of that feedback and flexibility. So how do you approach aligning your work with an organization's overall strategy

from day one. So we, we don't our work doesn't exist outside of of their, of their strategic, desired outcomes. So it's unearthing those very early on,

understanding them deeply and keeping them in mind all throughout the way. I think one specific area that we try to bring the collective team around is, who are the people that this, this asset website, other design piece that we're doing, who is that trying to serve? What need is that addressing? What are the challenges of that particular audience that we need to keep in mind? And then again, what's the desired outcome that you're hoping this audience will take? We define that early on, if that's not already previously defined for us, and that's a collaborative process, and then it's something that we refer to throughout the project. And even as we're getting design feedback, we try to ask challenging questions as we're getting that feedback around what's the strategic reaction? Or how is what what you're reacting to? If they're giving some you know, they don't like a color, or they're not happy with something beyond the right versus the left,

you know, what's the strategy behind that feedback? You know, how are you concerned that that might not address the goals?

That we have together

because, you know, ultimately, yes, we want everybody to like the work that we're doing, and it's generally not an issue for us. But

at the same time, it's really most important that the community that that's serving and trying to engage their needs are served. This website's not about us. It's not really even about the client in directly. It's about who they're trying to serve, and trying to make sure that, you know, we're being strategic about every detail, from the labels and the navigation to you know where there are call to actions, how those call to actions are presented again, with those people in mind, and what they're looking for in mind? Great. So you mentioned personas. I think you said personas, or at least that's what my brain registered. Do you do you find sometimes that people are there? Do you try to narrow down the personas? Because I can, and I think, you know, thinking back to my that library, one of the challenges was that we had multiple audiences, right, that we were trying to reach. And so, yeah, we what we often, what we find is, when we do our audience exercise, we'll often get details for anywhere from a half a dozen to a dozen unique audiences. When we do analysis of that, we find it's generally not that hard to get that down to three or four. Okay, not to say that those audiences are the same, but needs are similar enough, and desired outcomes are similar enough that we can consider them similarly, you know. So it makes it a little bit easier. But that said, within the, you know, within the website, different areas of the website can focus on different audiences a little bit differently. You know, the about page, for example, or an impact page we're going to give consideration to, you know, corporate partners, major givers, you know, individual donors a little bit differently than we might. You know someone who's looking at a program page and the events that those are offering that they want to attend, those events, which might be, you know, different communities. So there's, there is some flexibility within a site to try to have focus in different areas, so that you're not always talking to all four or five of your primary audiences at once, which is challenging. Great. Thank you. Well, how can folks get in touch with you if they want to learn more? Well, we're here on LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn, and love connecting and engaging there. So can look me up. Seth Giammanco

from my profile there. Certainly can check us out at mod hyphen lab.com

and our website. And if you'd like to email, you could email at Hello at mod hyphen lab.com Okay, wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Seth, this has been a great conversation, and thanks everybody for joining us for our Impactful Projects and Planning series. Thanks. Thank you.