Don’t Just Watch the HIPPO Swim Faster

We’ve all been in that meeting. You gather a large group – maybe 6-12 people – tasked to decide the layout and content for some parts of your Website. Maybe you also invited your agency or designer there as well. It’s an emotional meeting, as everyone has their opinion on everything from the layout and color scheme to the most important message/promotion to put on the top of the page. Should the hero image be of a businessman using our product or close-ups of the product itself? How much text should we put on the page? You spend many hours over many meetings – maybe over many weeks – debating and debating. Then, someone has to break the impasse. And guess who that is? Well, the boss of course! That’s the privilege (and burden) of being the boss – you get to make the tough decisions.

In the world of Website design, we call this phenomenon making decisions by HiPPO – the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. On one level, this is not that shocking – one can argue that most business decisions are made by HiPPO – why else would we need the boss in the first place? The implicit assumption is that the boss is the boss because they either have the intelligence, experience, or perspective to make those kinds of decisions, and for many decisions within a company, that may make sense (regardless of whether or not you are a fan of your own personal HiPPO).

Continues @ http://interwovenblog.com