It has to tick the boxes.
Receiving an award is wonderful recognition for a job well done. It means your peers have rewarded you and your team for a project that not only excelled in its marketing, branding or strategic criteria, but stood above the crowd in doing so.
We know the basics don’t change. When any team starts building a website (or any platform for that matter), it must align with the ‘full’ marketing strategy of any given brand, product or service, it must directly empower user research into that space, and provide great opportunities for engagement with the entity in the form of lead generation, sales or positive research outcomes and it must do this while providing a good, natural user experience. It has to improve all key measurement metrics to show that it worked. And it has to meet the budget even with the inevitable functional and strategic creep that happens in every project.
These all need to be in place for you to get your nomination. Without them you won’t, but to win the award, well that needs a bit more.
Stratitude recently won a New Gen ‘Gold’ Award for the Chas Everitt Luxury brand. It’s really just a property sales website that has blogs, search, lead generation through WhatsApp as a primary channel, is responsive and natural on nearly all devices, and looks great in the process. We ticked the boxes. But what made it win?
It must not settle for tropes and user experience memes and other silly ‘industry standards’.
Our search facility doesn’t care about how many bathrooms and bedrooms you want, what type of ‘unit’ the property is, and other negligible concerns for our users. If our user research indicates that users are thinking about x, why would we bother them with y? Why would we spend budget and time on y at all?
Our research showed, comprehensively, that our users are interested in lifestyle, the landscape and space the property is in and what the schools, activities and other opportunities an area or landscape has, not whether it has 4 or 6 bathrooms. That’s what was important to them. We had to provide a search, but we did it in a way that talked to our users and empowered them to search in a way that felt good.
A great user experience is not taking something someone else has done well, that became an industry standard, and then rolled out with a brand compatible styling on your own platform. It’ll definitely tick the box, but will it stand out? My first advice for winning an award is always look for opportunities to provide standard functionality in an interesting way that talks to your audience and their goals and desires.
Tech for tech’s sake—because it’s cool, new, and trendy to use.
I don’t know how many devs tried to shoe-horn AI into a space that didn’t need it, was made more complex by using it, and then requested all the budget to do it because, we must use AI now.
Saying an award-winning website must use the latest technologies would be a cop-out. It’s likely listed in the award submission criteria, but if I was assessing a project and they said ‘we chose not to use AI, QR codes, augmented reality or (insert industry tech buzz stuff here) because…’ that would be far more interesting to me.
We did use AI (we ticked the box) but we used it to research schools, lifestyle activities, proximity to important landmarks and famous architects and designers and create really good SEO ready content for each property in this way. It saved the agents time, it empowered our moderation and publishing teams, and it talked directly to our user strategy. It was anything but tech for tech’s sake, it was an execution of the right technology inside the defined strategy for the benefit of all parties involved, especially our users.
And it worked great. My second piece of advice is never use tech for tech’s sake. Put effort into how any given tech best supports your strategy. Then let it do its thing.
I can’t speak on behalf of the judges, although, I can say we nailed all the awards submission criteria for this project. This may all sound like hearsay, but the proof is in the pudding and the award is in our cupboard.
Our project stood out above the rest of the AI-integrated, user-centric, reactive Javascript, (insert other 2024 digital marketing buzzword here) projects because we cared about the basics enough to use those things to make a great platform for our users and our clients in a way that made real-world sense. And we ticked ALL the boxes. My strong suspicion is the judges saw and rewarded that.