My current favorite TV show is Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, where Gordon drops into a failing restaurant for a week. It’s pretty much the same show every time, in both the British and the American versions. Gordon reorders the menu and the staff, swearing colorfully the whole time, and tries to set the restaurant on a path to customer satisfaction and financial stability. He does this by imposing focus on the team and menu.

It’s the same for websites. Focus is key. Focus on the customer, get rid of extraneous stuff that is in your and in their way, and let your staff keep a smaller and more focused website fresh.

In a typical show, Gordon finds an undisciplined staff who have lost their passion for food and customer service. They are going through the motions, using frozen, powdered, canned, and otherwise processed ingredients to cope with having committed to being everything to everyone. Gordon insists that the kitchen team must focus to deliver well. He slims down a menu the size of the phone book into a distilled list of seasonally and regionally appropriate fare. Initially, the chef/owners resist paring down the menu. They don’t want to disappoint the few stalwarts who care about the rutabaga ravioli. What they fail to realize is that the phone-book-sized menus stress out their customers and their staff for two different reasons. Customers don’t actually want that many choices. Studies described in The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less show that fewer choices for customers lead to happier decisions and a better overall experience. For the staff, it’s a matter of focus, the kitchen staff can’t deliver 100 dishes at the same quality and consistency that they can deliver, say, 10.

Lessons from the kitchen for your website

• Winnow your message - serve the right 5 things instead of hoping that somewhere in your list of 500 you’ve hit on something of value. Redesigning existing websites that have accumulated a lot of pages over time requires discipline and courage. The team needs to excise what isn’t working and to refine what is valuable. Website analytics can tell you where folks are leaving and what they do value. That’s a start.
• Talk to your customers. If you don’t (yet) have customers, talk to your potential customers. Gordon has taken the kitchen staff out to meet potential customers on golf courses and city streets to gain publicity, give away free samples, and learn what the local folk want. Make sure the most important voices - the voices of your site’s target audience - are included in the web re-design process. Use target personas in the design process and test design iterations/prototypes of the website with sample users.
• Focus on the customer. Gordon shreds chefs who focus on “innovation”/technical wizardry that results in unappealing food (garlic shrimp and strawberries in the same salad?). When in doubt, make decisions based on what is best for your visitor, not what is easiest for your IT department, or what is hardest (and therefore most interesting), or what the competition is doing. Instead of a snazzy new color scheme or updated logo, why not work hard on making decisions about coveted homepage real estate based on the needs of your customer/client/target audience. This short circuits the problem of “design by HiPPO” (highest paid person’s opinion).
• Keep it fresh. Some of the most vivid scenes in Kitchen Nightmares are when Gordon excavates rotting food from the back of the walk-in refrigerator or finds surfaces that haven’t been scrubbed since the 80s. Have you ever been frightened away from a company or site by glaringly out of date information? Each page on the website is a commitment. Keeping things up to date is easier when the site is tight and the web team has the resources to support it.

A simple, easy-to-use website isn’t easy-to-build. It involves making real trade-offs, choosing a target audience and message and focusing on it, instead of trying to satisfy everyone. Do the hard work of choosing so your site visitors don’t have to. Making it easy for your visitors takes time, learning from mistakes, and a passion for listening - listening to the website analytics patterns and listening to the voices of the target users/audience. This investment is worth the effort, saving waste and rework later, sparing your team and your site visitor from website information past its due date, websites that miss their target audience, and awful passion-throttling mediocrity.

Inspired by the 37 Signals post What Gordon Ramsay can teach software developers.