Wednesday, March 11, 2009

The Designer's Dilemma

So let's say you're a designer. And you come up with a really cool idea for a design. Things expand and collapse as you click on them. You can move effortlessly from page to page. If there's further information needed on a question, you only see that if you click on a particular answer. It's pretty awesome.

Then let's pretend you get really excited about that design. And you want to show it off, because frankly it's the most excited you've been about a design in quite a while. So you show it off to your team members and they act appropriately impressed.

Then you decide, "I want to show the client for whom I'm designing this that I have initiative and I'm thinking in different ways about the application. So you show it to them and they really like it a lot.

So you're getting jazzed up about it. Getting excited. You're breaking new ground with the designs.

Until you show them to Development. And based on the timeline from the client, there's no way that they can do what you designed. And you like the Development team. You don't like putting them over a barrel where they have to say No to a client. And it's at that point that you realize your mistake. You got so excited about your design that you forgot to properly vet it with Development before showing it to the clients.

And now it's you who has to fall on his sword and tell the clients that you can't really do all the cool things you wanted and that they liked. And you can still do some really cool stuff, but just not AS cool as what you had before.

Not that anything like that has happened to me in the last 7 days or anything...

3 comments:

Clarissa said...

Bless your heart, Phil. Bless your heart.

Jeff Dodson said...

Phil, I work in software development, so I can feel your pain! Not that anything like this has ever happened to me either...

Keith Brenton said...

I think that's right up there with having to re-name hundreds of photo pages on your church site because its software gave all of them the same name based on the name of each photo, rendering all links useless and directing browsers only to the first photo page in the series.

(Not that I've ever done anything like that this week.)

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