Direct Steps / Mere Agency was founded in 2011 by Matt Heerema with the goal of helping businesses and organizations impact the world through their good work. Matt has put together a core team of skilled artisans from all over the industry to create beautiful, effective, custom web presences for a wide range of organizations. Mere is a small but mighty agency, with years of experience serving a wide variety of industries.
Mere’s team members have worked on projects of all shapes and sizes, from internationally read, industry leading sites such as Engadget.com, WordPress.com, and Autoblog.com, with millions of readers a day, to international non-profits and ministries.
Matt Heerema
Founder and Strategist
Andrew Joyce
Operations Lead
Jason Funk
Strategic Partner
For the last twelve years, we have operated as Mere Agency, marketing primarily toward the non-profit and church/ministry sector. We have decided it’s time to branch out, so we are launching the Direct Steps sub-brand.
Your business is making the world a better place just like the non-profits we serve. We want to help make that happen as effectively as possible!
The Five Keys
Design principles that guide why we do what we do:
1. “Don’t Make Me Think”
This is the sum and goal of usability-focused design. Our work is to minimize work for the user, to minimize thought, to seek to make every aspect of the site as immediately evident as possible. This is accomplished primarily through excellent information architecture, minimalistic graphic design, and a deep understanding of the relevant industry research, and specific testing of your site’s user base. The other principles flow from this principle.
2. The Smallest Effective Difference
A call to minimalism in design. A combination of Edward Tufte’s work in “Visual Explanations” and Dieter Rams’ 6th and 10th principles of design: “Good design is honest” and “Good design is as little design as possible.” Focus on the essential. Do not seek to manipulate the user or obfuscate what is really present. Do not burden the design with non-essentials. Design is as-subtle-as-possible, while still remaining effective.
3. Follow Conventions
Because we are seeking to minimize, or when possible, negate, the learning curve involved with using your site, we should follow current Web design conventions to the degree that they help a user find what they need on your site. Note: because much Web design is done apart from research and usability-thinking, there are some “popular” Web design trends that are copied between many popular sites that do not actually serve this purpose. These should be avoided.
4. Universal Usability
Every user of your site should have full and unhindered access to every function of your site, regardless of what device, platform, technology, or assistive device they are using to browse it. W3C Web Standards exist to ensure that this is possible.
5. Form Serves Function
An old Shaker proverb that ought to be applied to the Web says “Do not make something unless it is both necessary and useful, but if it is both necessary and useful, do not hesitate to make it beautiful.” This is the final principle on purpose, but an important one, and an important aspect of craftsmanship. In line with the above principles, we should also seek to make sites beautiful for our audience. These principles all lead us to focus on typography and relevant photography and videography as our primary design elements.