I just stumbled across Cennydd’s post about ‘blaming the designer’, which somewhat reflects my work experiences in the past year. I too, found the “design hell” comic to be humorous, and admittedly counted it as gospel truth initially. Then I forgot about it and like all designers/developers, went back and dealt with the hard stuff and worked until our product was finally launched or finished.
Aim for the finish as a team, not for the journey
And so, a few weeks ago on the eve of Christmas last year, we launched our site live. My client, my boss, was happy with the results and our effort to implement tiny changes at the very last minute, and I admit I’m happy with the outcome myself, despite all the ranting and heated arguments about things like how consistency in design isn’t everything and about not adding more ‘unnecessary’ features. It was satisfying to know that my client was happy – that we had produced something that was ready for launch, live. And I think that’s something all designers and developers need to keep in front of their minds, rather than the course at hand.
The opportunities are in our hands
We live in a world that’s increasingly complex, and we appreciate and learn of each other’s strengths in bits and pieces at a time. To this end, I admit my own shortcomings of not being able to bridge the gap between business, marketing, design and engineering more effectively for my client. I now believe that creative freedom comes with caveats, and it is rare that clients will allow designers all the freedom in the world. It is increasingly becoming the designer’s responsibility to seize the opportunity to educate and collaborate with clients to solve problems ‘the design way’, meeting both design and business goals.
I see this as a major opportunity for creative types – designers, content managers, UX consultants, even developers. This is because clients know they are partly ignorant about design and are willing to hear what we have to say. At they same time, they’re not going to back down on what they know best about business, and we need to be sensitive to that.
Putting things to practice
So how would I react this time around?
I think, for a start, my attitude has to be right. I need to stay positive and not try to put down the ideas that come from clients. I should give credit where credit is due, and understand that not every solution is ideal. In fact, some of them are hacks due to various factors like time or lack of knowledge. As iteration is always possible (especially for the web), this isn’t a big problem. Solutions can always be improved, and it’s best to allow some “hacks” to pass, and learn from it through testing and user feedback.
I also feel documentation is key, and putting things down in black and white makes it easy for everyone in the team to see how the design has progressed from day one. Everything that’s documentable is valuable – wireframes, sketches, screenshots, feature requests, reasons for change, points of argument, etc. While I don’t think everything has to be documented, our team did make use extensive use of tools and artifacts to facilitate communication. So, use them wisely.
Finally, the success of the design should be celebrated at the end of a major phase. I somehow feel the best person to do this is the client, but this doesn’t always happen. In some ways, the client’s utmost satisfaction acts as a major milestone in the outcome of a project. In my case, it was my boss’s satisfaction and decision to launch the site live. He brought in a bottle of champagne and we toasted to the launch on Christmas eve, which helped to finalize a major phase in the project and ease fears that we might be carrying on throughout the holidays.
Whatever it is, we all crave to closure to our efforts, some space to regenerate and look forward to our next big task.
