156 WHO: Riding the Project Life Cycle: We Never Forget a Phase
How does the database work? Your developers know. Meet with them separately and then bring one or more to the next client meeting.
The possibilities are endless—when you first enter the room. After several successful analysis meetings, the possibilities should have focused into a set of meaningful and achievable goals. If you’re still talking in generalities after two or three meetings, you’re not doing your job. If you’re talking in generalities after four or five meetings, the client is not serious. Timelines with cash consequences can sober up most clients. Have an attractive, friendly project manager explain to the client the additional costs incurred as his indecisiveness causes deadlines to shift.
Design
The design phase is a simple word for a heck of a lot of activity. The process nearly always unfolds something like this:
■Brainstorm and problem solve with your team.
■Translate needs into solutions.
■Sell ideas to the client.
■Identify color comps to be developed.
■Create color comps and proof of concept.
■Present color comps and proof of concept.
■Revise and repeat as necessary.
■Receive design approval.
Brainstorm and problem solve
As soon as your team has a clear understanding of the client’s business problems, goals, constraints, and requirements, you can begin brainstorming solutions on your own, in partnership with other web designers, and in meetings with developers, producers, and information architects.
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A project manager will join the team if she has not already done so. Make her your best friend. While you conceive grand notions or are daydreaming in Adobe Illustrator, she will be keeping track of and documenting schedules, deadlines, goals, and progress. We wouldn’t last a minute in her job. Nor would most “creative” folks. Respect her for doing what you would pay not to do.
Methods of brainstorming vary. Some groups like to shout out ideas, writing everything down on a whiteboard. Others like to go off in small groups and then reassemble to critique each other’s ideas. Sometimes you sit in the corner and type out ideas. Sometimes you draw on a traditional sketchpad. Some agencies dictate how the process should work; others let you
figure it out for yourself.
Translate needs into solutions
The web designer and other team members will collectively come up with a number of solutions, which will then be narrowed down by group consensus, creative director fiat, or both. These solutions may be articulated internally through any combination of rough design sketches, internal Photoshop comps, written documents, or wireframes (functional visual storyboards showing the proposed site elements in relation to each other, but not in any way indicating how they will eventually look and feel).
To present these ideas to the client, you can once again use any of the following:
■Rough design sketches
■User interface documents
■Creative briefs
■Pencil sketches
■Wireframes
■Color comps
158 WHO: Riding the Project Life Cycle: We Never Forget a Phase
Sell ideas to the client
Using any or all of the tools just listed, the team presents their projected solutions to the client, answering questions, justifying decisions and methods, and discussing alternatives. As part of this discussion and “selling” process, the designer should be able to:
■Articulate technology limitations. Explain why the team supports a particular solution and avoid committing to alternatives that won’t work.
■Articulate design considerations and decisions. As in a traditional design project, explain the rationale behind various creative decisions.
Articulating the limitations of technology and the needs of users can be tricky. The web designer must be familiar with technological issues involved in web development to be able to explain why the team supports a particular solution and to prevent impossible agreements and commitments.
Impossible agreements occur when the client asks for something that cannot be done, cannot be done within the budget and time frame, or just plain should not be done—and an inexperienced web designer or project manager commits the company to fulfilling that unreasonable or impossible expectation. Don’t laugh. Plenty of web design teams have met their doom by committing to solutions that are technologically or graphically inappropriate, more costly than they’re worth, impossible to deliver within the given time frame, or simply deeply stupid.
We were once asked to design the interface for a sophisticated, multi-user business software program that ran in a web browser. Essentially, the product was an intranet site with advanced functions rivaling that of expensive proprietary software. Though a sales force had lined up dozens of large corporate buyers, the developers were unable to deliver the product because its scope kept shifting as the executive in charge came up with one “neat idea” after another that he insisted on incorporating into the product. The design team and sales force sat on their hands while the developers burned out trying to fulfill constantly shifting objectives.
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The executive then decided that the seemingly undeliverable product would sell better if users could visually customize it to their liking. He asked that a series of “skins” be developed, and the project manager added this requirement to the mountain of unattained goals. The last we heard, the product was still in development.
This kind of foolishness most often takes place in-house, where egos run unchecked and projects can drag on forever without obvious financial con- sequences—because those who do the work are on the company payroll anyway. But it also can creep into traditional client-vendor relationships if project managers accept impossible agreements.
That’s the worst-case scenario. The only-slightly-better scenario is that your company will somehow fulfill the impossible agreement only to watch the client fail because everyone shook hands over a really bad idea. The client may want his e-commerce site visitors to enter personal data and create a unique user account before even seeing what he has to offer. He may request this at the last minute, and the web agency may manage to fulfill the request on time and within the budget. But nobody will use the site, and the client could bad-mouth the agency rather than admit his own folly, thus harming your business for years to come.
Even if the client has only good things to say about you, you don’t want your clients to fail, and you don’t want the press to associate your agency with widescreen, Technicolor flops. It will take all your expertise at client negotiation to avoid the Titanic effect (also known as the Boo.com effect). But it’s better to face conflict than to knowingly deliver bad work.
The best-case scenario, of course, is to come up with and sell workable solutions that offer real value to the audience your client wishes to reach.
How Not to Do It
“Because I know what I’m doing, and you’re a pathetic marketing flack who wouldn’t know a good idea if it bit him on the thigh.”