He shamelessly cited the momentum of the corporation, its ability to to move in the same direction even when beset by challenges or unexpected market forces, because the sheer volume of trade wouldn’t be impacted by sporadic issues.

Looking back, one sees that he worked for what is possibly the least innovative company on earth. It did, step by step, months and often years after the competition, adapt to new realities. And as it did, it remained afloat. There’s a lesson there. If you’re such a giant, you can get by with doing the least possible, relying on a mind-bogglingly large client base to pay for your sluggish behaviour.

Then there’s the rest of us. While Mike Tyson isn’t known for his business strategy, he taught us a valuable lesson when saying that “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

When wisdom comes from a boxer, you expect it to be direct and visceral. But consider his words for what they really mean. Our strategy is a longer term and broader reaching sequence of events than a boxer’s plan. We hope to go on for longer than a handful of rounds. But it can also be derailed by a sudden and unexpected turn of events. Which we have all had to contend with to a certain degree when a pandemic comes knocking on our door.

For better or worse we’ve all adjusted our strategies. We’ve hunkered down, assessed our costs, reevaluated our resources, sought new client bases… We have also pivoted entire businesses, reassessed our brand’s purpose, figured out new ways to reach our audiences…. But have we really, fundamentally, worked on our strategy?

It seems to me that we have changed plenty of tactics. In military terms, we have picked our battles and sought to fight them on familiar ground. But is it possible to win plenty of battles and still lose the war? Let’s look at WWII and find out:

When the sovereignty of Poland was under threat by Nazi Germany, Britain raised an admonishing finger. They said, in no uncertain terms, that invading Poland would be tantamount to a declaration of war. We all know what happened.

Years of bloody battles ensued, at tremendous human and capital cost until that fateful day when the Nazi flag was torn down from the Reichstag in Berlin.

With war finally over, Britain effectively handed over Poland to Russia to say thank you for their contribution that helped win the war.

Did Britain actually win the war if the first thing they did was hand over the very reason they started to fight in the first place? Is it possible to have a strategy that has a very defined goal at the outset and to lose sight of it once the going gets tough and does so repeatedly?

We have had wave after wave of blows and of hope. At the end of 2020 we were mostly acting like the turn of the New Year would somehow let the virus know that it had overstayed its welcome. We have had news of a vaccine followed by news of more virulent and deadly strains. We have had countries that had to double down on second and third lockdowns. What happens to our strategy when it takes more than one punch in the face?

The first thing to do is to step back from the noise, to view the bigger picture with the clarity that is afforded by standing away from the flames for a brief moment. There is a bitter irony to this. How can I help save my business that has little fires everywhere if I’m not running around with buckets of water, putting them all out?

It does help to step back though. When we’re busy fighting the small battles, we lose sight of the bigger picture, and the bigger picture is the company’s core purpose. Why did we set out to do all this in the first place? This helps us get back to the room and know which fires to prioritize and, in some cases, which to completely ignore. After all, prioritizing helps with the crucial endeavour of focusing our resources where they really need to be deployed.

While we’re a step back, it pays to see the business with the eyes of an outsider. Find an outsider you can trust and engage in honest and open dialogue with them. Chances are that this could be painful. It hurts when you’re asked why you do something the way you do it and find out that your only answer is, “because we’ve always done it that way.” Only repeat what you’ve been doing if you can find fresh justification to do so.

Base your updated strategy on agility and, if possible, on building a war chest in parallel. Acting like this pandemic will be over and then the sun will shine and there will be no more problems ever again is just nonsensical. The statistical probability of another pandemic next week is exactly the same as the start of this one was. And pandemics are not the only potential disruptors to global or local business. Your next strategy must be built on agile foundations, with steps in place to make sure you bend rather than snap when the next blow is dealt.

In the meantime, it is wise to think of a post-war economy. This sees a certain amount of jubilant and irrational spend but it also sees the entrenchment of a more thrifty mindset. Applying this to your strategy will help you build something of a warchest, squirreling away some funds to help with the next unexpected move.

Once you’ve updated your core strategy, leave it there for a while. Then revisit it after a week or so. There is a possibility that you will see it as familiar but that it will appear flat or slightly superficial. This is the point of revisiting. The best strategies are several layers deep. While laying out the foundations for business growth, for agility, for sustainable growth in brand value, and for long-arc product lifecycles, we do not always look around us at our environment and craft strategies to account for all possible avenues.

Is there a possibility that part of your strategy is designed purely to force your main competitors to overspend on marketing, depleting their resources? Could your strategy involve placing regulatory pressure that will eventually swing such a crucial aspect of the external environment your way? Have you considered that your most precious resource is human capital and how you could wind up employing all of the most valuable minds in your industry, gaining unshakeable advantage?

So revisit your strategy with a significantly broader perspective the second time around. Add depth and retain the elements that keep you nimble and unwavering. And when you’re done, summarize it. Reduce your strategy to the point where you can explain it to your mum in a lift ride. This could be the hardest step but it is crucial. Because once you’ve done that, it means more to you than anything and it is now in a format that can be communicated to everyone on the team. With everyone on the team working to the same strategy, it is going to be tough for anyone, or anything, to knock you off your course for longer than you can handle.

1. Step back from the noise and reassess your strategy without distraction from the daily grind
2. View your strategy as an outsider or with an outsider and retain those bits that withstand the scrutiny
3. Base your updated strategy on agility
4. Include provision for the gradual building of a resource war chest
5. Revisit after a while and add depth to your strategy, considering a wider set of influences on your business
6. Distill your new strategy into a very concise mantra and share it with your team

The post Add depth to your business strategy for built-in resilience appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

For a lot of brands, it’s the only form of storytelling they can have a little fun with. From glitchy graphics to hidden links to slow-scrolling pictures, web design enhances what’s good about your brand to mythic proportions. It’s the Willy Wonka method of storytelling, everything bigger and brighter and more beautiful. 

In 2021, web design isn’t just storytelling; it’s crucial storytelling. Without a good website now, the losses aren’t even calculable. 

And that’s without taking into account the fact that without a website, your brand might not exist on the greater planes of the web. 

So. 

Let’s talk about web design. 

The State of Web in 2021

As with most trends, what happens on the web starts out in real life. 

What happened in real life is this: people stayed indoors. Mobile phone users glued themselves to their phones. Internet usage skyrocketed. 

Websites ruled. 

In Malta alone, 91% of the country was online by January 2020. It’s estimated that, during COVID-19, internet usage increased to 100% in countries most afflicted by it – think Italy, the United States, even Malta. Online traffic surged. 

Globally, transactions online increased 39.7% from January 2020 to January 2021. Global conversion rates increased by 40.3% for the same time period. 

Everywhere, everyone, was online. 

Which meant that everywhere, everyone, had something to say about web design. 

Web is the first impression your audience will get with your brand. Websites that load slowly, are difficult to access from mobile devices, or are just plain ugly are going to affect your brand’s reputation, even if you don’t know it. 

A negative review left on Facebook is bad. 

A person who clicks through your website and leaves without saying anything at all is worse. 

85% of B2B and 79% of B2C consumers put a lot of value into the experience they have with a brand. That includes their first impression of your website, and how easy it is to understand. 

Web Design 2021

Here’s what we’re seeing in Web Design for 2021. 

Silverscreen Life

Let’s face it: we’re unlikely to move past the pandemic in the next year or so. In the meantime, there’s been a resurface of digital events, digital experiences, and digital lives, from online lectures to virtual lives. 

Interactive websites can make the separation between virtual and IRL seamless. 

Do you remember the early internet? All those clickable, hidden links?

This is similar, though without the 90s pop-up ads. 

Think of clean, clear space and elaborate, moving visuals – parallax is making a comeback this year, and we’re a fan of it for clean websites that want enough animation to compel and hold the attention. 

Our tip: add animations. Animations help keep focus where static images struggle. The best of both worlds? Have a static image with some animation. Additionally, make sure your website can load up content fast – optimise it for that purpose. 

We See You

Seeing other humans has become a little more rare since the early days of lockdown. 

Is it any surprise that web design is suddenly, understandably, loaded up with images of humanity? Avatars, filters, memojis: human identity built to bridge a connection. Images of humans and personalised services bring the website back around to experience. 

The experience of your life, of how you look at the world, of how you understand. 

It builds connection. Seeing yourself reflected in images, your capabilities echoed in design, helps consumers feel like the brand considers them at all stages, not just to make purchases. It’s conversation and connection without being obvious.  

Dark mode or light? Colour or black and white? Larger text, smaller text?

Customisation features allows for audiences to really feel like the brand understands them, understands their needs, understands that sometimes they need text to be bigger or to have a different colour-palette for legibility. Each website a nest of interfaces. 

Each interface unique. 

Our tip: don’t skimp on accessibility. More people than you know struggle to read tiny text, tell colours apart, or to manoeuvre around a factory-built website. Give your audience as many ways of customising it as is possible, and remember that most of your consumers will be accessing your website through their phones or tablets. 

Remember When…?

We’ve been writing a lot about nostalgia recently, and with good reason. From clothing to web design, 2021’s bringing nostalgia back. 

In web design for 2021, this means tactile response. It means a physical moment made virtual. Web pages will scroll, turn, twist, move, just like the pages of a magazine, a leaf of postcards, a selection of notebook doodles. Websites look lived in and used and heavy. 

Websites are interactive. With so much of our lives conducted virtually, this interactivity, this physicality, helps connect a user to the moment. They’ll remember it. 

They’ll want to relive it. 

Forget the sleek, flat, 2020 gloss. 2021 is all about the heavy physicality of the past, ‘60s curves, ‘70s patterns and ‘80s colours.  

Our tip: What’s your favourite nostalgic memory? Is it the glitchy spatiality of Windows ‘95, or the sweepy, flowery patterns of ‘70s mandalas? Add that into your website – as text, as a graphic, as a hidden link. Nostalgia makes people feel better, think back to a better time. Happier consumers are more likely to remember you when they’re in a position to buy something.

Design With Purpose

There’s been a lot in the news lately about historical moments. We’re living through something that is going to be taught in schools, immortalised in memoirs, and taken apart by university graduates. What history is going to remember is who helped, who hindered, and who watched. 

Companies are expected to be the helpers. 

Brands are expected to talk about social issues. Audience loyalty, especially now, is a fickle thing to hold: with so many companies talking so much about so many things, it’s easy to switch to a company that better holds your values. We’ve spoken about this before, and we’ll continue to say it – your best supporter is always going to be who you cultivate. 

Web design in 2021 puts your loyalties at the centre. 

You have to talk about what you support. Sustainability? Community responsibility? Put it in there. Dig through your archives to showcase the diversity of your customers. Add a graphic to talk about burnout. Your audience wants to know that you care. 

In 2021, it’s fundamental that you do. 

Our tip: you have to have an initiative you’re proud of. Maybe you boosted your employees’ wages when so many other companies slashed them. Maybe you switched to environmentally-friendly packaging. Find your pride, and put it where people can see it. 

Softer, Soothing, Supportive

From gentle colours to feel-good news, web design in 2021 wants to uplift. 

This means a call back to simplicity. Clean lines. Pastels bleeding into one another. Colours. Whimsical type. 

Whereas 2019 was all about the corporate, the glossy, glassy, smooth, professional web, 2021 is about softness and feeling good and design that makes you happy. 

Our tip: Play around with colours, shapes, and text. We’ve had our fill of professional blue, corporate grey, and gentle beige. A pop of colour, a curlier text, can help liven up a corporate website – and show your brand’s personality a little better. 

Statistics for Web in 2021

We don’t like telling you what to do without backing it up with facts. 

Here are a few to get you started. 

• 55.64% of internet users come from mobile devices. 
• 68% of consumers expect better from businesses when it comes to digital capabilities. 
• 94% of people notice the appearance of a website first, and make the decision whether or not to continue using it on that appearance.
• People make up their minds about a website within 50 milliseconds. 
• Websites that take longer than 2 seconds to load abandon the website 38% of the time. 
• 48% of people decide a business’ credibility based on their website design. 
• 85% of users believe a mobile website should be as good or better than the desktop version. 

Web Design Going Forwards

We’ve made a lot of changes in the year and a half of the pandemic. 

Only some of it is internal. 

The rest is external: in the way we run our social media apps, the way we talk to each other online, the way everything looks. From sleek, flat, angular design, we’ve gone for softer curves, brighter colours, and better usability. As more of our lives become entwined with online, this is not likely to change. 

If anything, it’s going to become more important. Web is never going to be the same as it was before 2019. 

Neither are we. 

So hit the ground running, and get ready for the future.

And speak to us if you want to take this journey with us.

The post Web Design in 2021: Where We Were, Where We Are, Where We’re Going appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.