I'm working out a new course that I hope helps improve website development. It's called HiPPO Training, and this is a sneak peak at what it's all about. If you think you are the HiPPO, this may be some fairly 'hard cheese' to swallow, but this course comes from years of experience working in a very difficult space.

What makes web development so difficult? Simple: it makes no sense to anyone but people on the inside. It's a question of experience. Web devs live on the web. HiPPOs don't.

What is a HiPPO?

HiPPO stands for Highest Paid Person's Opinion. The acronym indicates a situation where a single executive's opinion drives the decision-making in a project. The term was coined to describe those situations where the decision goes against the advice of expert subordinates and, potentially, a mountain of data. HiPPOs are mostly associated with website development projects where an uninformed or under-informed opinion supports poor design choices or forces user-frustrating changes in an otherwise perfectly good website.

How do HiPPOs affect website development projects?

There are two issues. First, the presence of a HiPPO rules out the preferred web development method of open collaboration among more-or-less equal partners. If one person gets to say what happens, it means that other, potentially more experienced workers are not empowered to do their best work. It's true that in most business situations, the most senior worker holds the ultimate veto power. Thus, if that decision-maker makes well-informed decisions, there's no problem and, for our purposes, no HiPPO.

Which leads to the second issue. HiPPOs are, by definition, wrong. An uninformed approach to website development produces sites where business objective are put ahead of user needs. Ironically, this nearly always results in websites that fail to reach business goals.

More about why the web makes no sense at all after the jump -->

Why are HiPPOs so often wrong?

The bit above defines a veto-wielding executive that is not the HiPPO as one that makes "well-informed decisions", where as a HiPPO, by definition, makes decisions based on opinion. 

This is the crux: decisions based on information are almost certainly better than those based on opinion. In virtually every other aspect of business, this seems to be the accepted approach. For some reason, website design and development works on a different set of criteria where opinion rules.

Why should websites have different criteria?

There's no good reason. None at all.

In fact, most websites state well-reasoned objectives. It's just that the ways to achieve those objectives make no sense to anybody but a web developer. To be clear, it's not that web developers are crazy or that senior executives are somehow intellectually challenges.

It's as simple as this: winning formulas on the web often make no sense in a traditional business context. Web developers understand this, but senior executives - HiPPOs - don't.

Why are web developers the only workers who understand this "fact"?

In a word: experience. Web designers and developers have spent years in the trenches, learning from hard experience what works and what doesn't. Web workers "live" on the web. They (we) are the people who spend 6, 8 or 10 hours on the web every day. They are up-to-date on techniques and technologies. They can cite research studies about user behavior. They can look at a site and tell you how it was put together. They know who's up and who's down in the web world.

Web workers are serious, experienced professionals who have all learned a powerful, powerful lesson - the web is very different from any other communication medium. Ever. And it is different because the web is entirely counter-intuitive, especially in the commercial space. What works in traditional business fails on the web. What makes absolutely no sense in traditional business wins on the web.

The reason for this is that publishers are not in control of the way users experience their websites. Users, not publishers, choose which if any pages they view and in what order. Users, not publishers, decide what size and shape the web page is, or at least how wide and how tall the window is. Users can even select the size of the type on the web page. Users demand control and generally do not like websites that try to seize control from them.

HiPPOs, on the other hand, may not be highly experienced in using the web, and for good reason. By definition, HiPPOs are top executives with enormous responsibilities and enormous work loads. Because their main responsibilities are not web-based, there is no reason for them to spend inordinate amounts of time on the web the way web designers and developers do. Perhaps they have time to surf around some, but they probably don't spend the a big chunk of their day on dozens, perhaps hundreds of websites.

Thus, HiPPOs rarely have the same depth of experience that their expert subordinates do and may not appreciate the importance of key arguments that expert subordinates are making.

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