Chapter one

The brief, and the brief underneath it

They came to us for a website. What they described on the first call was a redesign: the same eleven thousand products, the same order form, a tidier set of pages around both. We agreed to two weeks of looking before anybody drew anything.

By the end of the first week it was clear the site was not the problem. The counter staff were re-keying orders that had already been placed online, because an online order arrived without the one field the warehouse needed to pick it. The website was the symptom.

So the brief changed before a single page was drawn. What they had asked for was a site that looked like the business. What they needed was a site that knew what was on the shelf, and those two things share almost none of the same work.

They asked for a website that looked like the business. The business was a shelf, and the shelf was the one thing the website had never known anything about.

Chapter two

Two weeks behind the counter

So we stood behind it. Half past seven in the morning, a queue of vans on the yard, and a trade customer who knows exactly what he wants and knows it by a part number he has never once typed in full. Nobody in that queue was going to describe a product. They were going to say four digits and wait.

We wrote down every question the staff were asked, for ten working days, and sorted them afterwards. Four hundred and thirty of them collapsed into eleven. Nine of the eleven were about stock: is it here, is it here today, and can I take it now.

Nothing in that fortnight was a design decision. All of it was.

• What we found. Four hundred and thirty questions over ten working days, and eleven distinct questions underneath them.
• What changed. The screen at the counter and the screen the customer sees now read the same stock figure.
• What it cost. Two people, ten mornings, and a fortnight in which we drew nothing at all.

Chapter three

Eleven thousand part numbers, cut to nine hundred

The catalogue had been added to for thirty years and never once pruned. Discontinued lines sat beside current ones with nothing to tell them apart, and the same washer appeared under four codes because four different buyers had entered it over three decades, each of them certain the code was a new one.

We did not build a better search. We sat with the two people who knew the range and cut it, line by line, over six weeks, down to the nine hundred products that had moved in the previous year. The rest went to an archive that is still there and is never shown first.

A search box is what you build when you have given up on the list.

The best thing we shipped that year was the ten thousand one hundred products nobody has to scroll past any more.

Interlude

In the client’s own words

“I thought you were wasting our money for a fortnight. You had two people standing at the end of the counter with a notebook while we were trying to serve a queue on a Monday, and I said so more than once. Then you put the list of questions in front of me and I recognised every one of them, and I had never once seen them written down.”

“What I did not expect was that the answer would mostly be deleting. I have been here twenty six years and I could not have told you which lines had stopped moving. Somebody had to sit with the file and be allowed to say no to it, and it turns out that was the part we were paying for.”

Chapter four

The order form, rebuilt around a van

The old form opened by asking for a delivery address. The new one opens by asking whether you are collecting, because two thirds of them are, and a collection has no address, no delivery window and no need to be asked about either.

It is one question at the top and it changes everything underneath it. The warehouse gets the field it was missing, the counter has stopped re-keying, and the form is shorter than it used to be for both kinds of customer.

Nobody asked for that question. It came out of the fortnight behind the counter, where every second customer had already answered it before anyone had thought to ask.

• What we found. Two thirds of orders were collected in person, and the form asked every one of them for a delivery address.
• What changed. One question at the top, and eleven fields that only appear for the third of orders that are delivered.
• What it cost. A fortnight of rebuilding, and one long afternoon spent arguing about the order of two questions.

Chapter five

A launch nobody announced

There was no launch email. The new site went up on a Tuesday in February, in the quietest week of their year, with every old address still resolving for anyone who had bookmarked a page deep inside it.

The measure of it, for the first fortnight, was how many phone calls the counter took about the website. The answer was four, and three of those were the same person, who had a bookmark to a page that no longer existed and was perfectly happy once he had a new one.

A quiet launch is not a lack of confidence in the work. It is the only way to find out what breaks while there is still somebody in the building with the time to fix it.

The measure of a launch is not the traffic on the first day. It is how quiet the phone stays on the second.

Chapter six

The year after

Online orders are most of the weekday morning now, and the counter is where the difficult ones happen rather than where all of them do. The staff still know the part numbers. They spend the morning answering the eleventh question instead of the first nine.

The client has asked to stay unnamed, which is fair enough: none of it is a secret and all of it is theirs. What we can say is that the work that mattered was two weeks of standing still and six weeks of deleting.

If there is a lesson in it, it is that the expensive part was never the building. It was agreeing what to leave out, and then actually leaving it out.

• What we found. The range, not the website, was the thing a customer in a hurry could not get through.
• What changed. Online orders are most of the weekday morning, and the counter now handles the ones that are genuinely difficult.
• What it cost. Eighteen months, and the two weeks of standing still at the start that made the other seventeen worth doing.