An expert delivering custom software solutions to accelerate your enterprise: DOOR3

The Silicon Review

DOOR3 is an independent technology consultancy, software development, and UX design firm headquartered in New York City. DOOR3 helps organizations, from startups to S&P 500 enterprises, modernize and align their technology to the future. The company starts with a consultative approach grounded in informed understanding and common cause. At DOOR3, the team brings empathy, collaboration, and shared purpose to all of its client relationships. DOOR3’s difference is a peerless capacity to de-risk complex software projects. DOOR3 reliably delivers vital solutions on time and on budget.

Founded in 2002, DOOR3 is headquartered in New York City, and supported by a global team of talented professionals committed to building business applications and technology of lasting value.

Enterprise Design System

Creating consistency in branding and content across the net is a daunting task for many enterprises. Enterprise Design Systems offer unique solutions through UX/UI design tools packaged within a simple framework to make and push updates to numerous platforms. Moreover, the pace of development is such that organizations are pressed with a sense of urgency to unify their message and offerings as they evolve. Creating a UX design system is complicated, but once established, it delivers effortless team collaboration and additional time for creative work.

“An enterprise architecture design system is an organized collection of rules, constraints, and principles meant to streamline design processes.”

Essentially, they are a platform to organize all the tools that can help businesses build a product. It is a repository of all the elements that form part of an application, a website, or any digital product. We can think of this as a visualization of a collection of rules or core principles governing the design of an enterprise. Tom McClean, a Senior Designer at DOOR3, takes a philosophical perspective on understanding design systems: It is the one source of truth that we can all reflect back to and see as the main component, the main source of everything. A design system acts as a master copy that people can refer to for guidance. In practice, however, this unified vision can sometimes become distorted in the process.

Website Redesign Project Risk Factors

Businesses should take steps to improve their risk management capabilities as per the 2022 Global Risk Survey. Websites are often the first point of contact with your audience, and a poor website is a real problem. As the negative impressions accumulate, business suffers. Eventually, the pressure becomes sufficient to create a consensus to act. When this happens, executives allocate budgets, align priorities, and form stakeholder teams. By being aware of website redesign project risks, you can be better prepared to deal with them if they do occur. The teams draft RFPs, then source and evaluate vendors. Everyone works hard to steer the project through months of meetings, designs, eventually implementation, and deployment. Finally, after setbacks and delays, the new site goes live. Many website redesign projects operate under unreasonable time pressure. This is largely due to organizational complexities and team dynamics. Moreover, unrealistic and overly aggressive timelines tend to compound other factors as well. Often, the stakeholders try to substitute assumptions for a genuine discovery process. This is particularly true concerning the development of thorough user personas and user journeys. Constrained by time, these exercises are demoted in priority or afforded only a surface-level treatment. Taking shortcuts and rushing will ultimately cost you. For example, when direct user interviews are not conducted and instead stakeholder-provided descriptions are adopted unchallenged.

Due diligence is important for any business venture. However, when it comes to website redesign project risk, there is an increased chance of failure if the stakeholder lacks proper research in structuring a website and competition. Direct interviews and current site analysis will yield unique, unexpected discoveries indicating customer goals not currently understood or fully serviced. Improving the value proposition to align with these goals will contribute significantly to the ROI of the redesign effort. Such opportunities to interact with your users are important and rare. Rushing past them to form conclusions off of assumptions is a basic website redesign project risk you should avoid at all cost.

Making decisions based on assumptions is a risk. If you are feeling tentative about measuring your baselines and then planning to work on improving them, it may be a sign of a lack of confidence in your decision-making process. A company undertaking a website redesign project is usually at their wits end with their old site. Therefore, spending more time analyzing it may seem counterintuitive. Often, this is reflected in how SEO concerns are treated within the larger context of project requirements. For the best results, the SEO objectives must not be addressed as a secondary follow-up to the rest of the process. This needs to be considered when undertaking a website redesign project.

To optimize discoverability, relevance, and eventually conversion and acquisition, these objectives must be factored into the Information Architecture phase, or even earlier into the User Journey creation. Measuring user statistics before and after a complete redesign is a powerful way to demonstrate the realized ROI of the overall effort. It is a fantastic way to highlight and showcase the stakeholder success.

Meet the leader behind the success of DOOR3

Alex Asianov, Founded DOOR3 in 2002 and serves as President. He brings nearly 25 years of expertise in operations management and analysis, including business process engineering, systems architecture and integration, and project management of globally distributed software delivery. Prior to starting DOOR3, Alex worked as an enterprise architect and technology strategist.