Design alone is not enough

A company that already communicates inefficiently internally can no longer make up for this externally. If you want to improve the basis for external communication, you should therefore start with the company's internal communication. Those who structure websites sometimes intervene deeply in internal company processes. Where do the sources of future communication originate? How do the streams of current internal communication flow? What does the editorial process of corporate communication look like and who checks it? How do we talk to the customer? Where are the results stored?

Interaction design is not a question of video, carousel or HTML5. Interaction design concerns the use of an interface. Interaction designers create interaction processes. A movie is not interactive. Films are passive. Alongside email, social media and the telephone, the website is a central interface between internal and external communication. Serious problems in the information architecture of a website are usually due to the fact that communication within the company does not work. Form without content, without structure, creates empty spaces. Stable form has inner stability.

Improving communication processes from the ground up is anything but an easy task for a small design agency. When questioning communication processes, it is quite possible to raise problems that make clients nervous. If you want to stabilize the information architecture of a company, you are tinkering with the brand architecture, tapping into the procedural backbone and thus the basic structure of a company. "You're meddling in things that don't concern you!" or "You're a designer, not a business consultant!" are reactions you have to expect.

Of course, as a simple web designer, you could just do what you were asked to do: Add carousels, movies, multi-megadropdowns and pretty pictures, colorful infographics, games, and, whoa, parallax scrolling. You could.

Thorough design, however, is not a prettification. Interaction designers are not façade builders. Thorough design changes the form from the inside, it shapes structures and processes. Quality is associated with effort, risks and a lot of patience.

Oliver Reichenstein is an information architect who lives and works in Tokyo.