Recently I took on my first ever design project. As an out-and-out developer by trade, this was kind of a big step, it’s been something I’ve been interested in doing for a while now, so when the opportunity presented itself I jumped at it; even with the low budget and my hectic schedule. What I wanted to share with you here though, is a little bit about the process I took doing this first project.
Coming from 4 years experience working in design agencies, I’m very much used to a process of high fidelity static designs first followed by the site build after client sign off. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve had my fair share of frustrations with this process over the years. However, due to this project having such a small budget, the client not being very au fait with the web in general and with my limited experience doing design work, I thought I would try it just this once.
Looking back I think I should have listened to my gut instinct, even with the above mentioned constraints and circumstances. The main reason being: Design sign off is a fallacy.
Design -> Sign off -> Develop
The first point I should have realised this kind of process was going to cause issues was even before I began the design, when talking about the contract. Because of the low budget and the limited time I had available to dedicate to the project I had one stipulation in the contract that got noticed by the client:
“you will be limited to one round of revisions at the design stage and one round at the development stage”
Immediately the client thought this would really restrict them, that they might be stuck with a design at some stage they didn’t like. After assuring this wouldn’t be the case and that the cause was more to manage expectations and to make them aware of the time spent on the project, we pressed on.
After the initial design, there were several times we went through a series of emails and phone conversations about amends. I finally brought this to an end after I sent the 4th set of static visuals, saying any more issues could be dealt with once we had some development done. This is where a conditional sign off, was given, most pages the client was happy with, but there was one that needed to be toyed with during development.
In development, the same thing happened. After replicating the designs which were “signed off” we went back and forth over almost every page once again. Changing images and content and layout on pretty much every page. We’re now at the point where the client is happy and are now just adding the final content links but still one of many email threads is currently 86 emails long and still with comments like: “oh and don’t forget we need to add…”.
A broken process
It shouldn’t take much (86 emails) to see that this process is broken. I’m not arguing here for and against static design vs. design in the browser, that’s a whole other kettle of fish, and even with a developer background I still find designing in Sketch/Illustrator (or whatever) easier to begin with. What I’m convinced is that doing a static design and then asking a client to “sign off” on it before going on to build a replica of that static visual, is rubbish.
The web, our medium, is not static. I know it gets said a lot but at times I feel it sometimes needs to be reiterated, you cannot represent the web via a static visual or mock up. To ask a client to sign off a static visual is to mis-represent the final product. There were so many revelations by the client once they started interacting with a real website it was fantastic, they finally understood more about what was going on and how the design which they had previously been unsure of from a static visual now made sense.
In the future for my own projects I think I’ll be combining the stages a lot earlier. By working on concepts with the client at an early stage in static form maybe, before moving as quickly as possible into the browser so the client can see how it will actually turn out. This way it makes my early work designing and creating ideas easier to mock up (I’m still not sure I could 100% design in the browser) but then getting into the browser quicker allowing the clients to see the ideas properly and as intended. Then iterate from there.
However, I still don’t think we have a solid answer to this problem yet, through working at conventional design agencies for the last 4 years it’s clear the process of design via static visuals is going to be around for a while. Although seeing them recently come up against the problem of how to get the interactiveness of a design across to clients does give me a little hope. I’m going to be moving to a digital agency soon, a change I’ve been thinking about for some time. I’m really interested to see what the difference in process might be with an agency which concentrates purely on digital projects.