A Checklist To Escape The Design Revisions
Revisions in web design tax both the designer/developer and the customer.
If you are asking yourself, is it right to throw last-minute edits at the design team;
If you are certain that on any project stage you can opt-in for as many revisions as you want;
If you are a developer with a “can-do” attitude and believe that every additional request should be delivered;
If you strictly follow the plan and don’t compromise on any “new small things”;
This post was created exactly with you in mind. You see, we have endured a lot of revisions and fixes that consumed more time than the original project. And we came up with the points of focus that helped us to reduce the revisions amount to ⅕ of what they used to be. Let us share them here.
How to prevent that extra mile from becoming a Sisyphus’ labor.
- Listen, Mike, can your team add some changes to the design? Something came up…There. The anxiety is taking over the room.
Necessary evil or standard business practice? Web design revisions come as the spark of the idea, the indecision, the last-minute overtime, the rushing message from the business frontier, the “a-ha moment”. In healthy amounts they indicate trust and communication, help to create a better product. Design revisions in tons are crippling the development team, hijack project timeline and allocated budget.
Customer and designer - you are in this together.
First, assume your client genuinely wants you to build the best design within a totally normal timeframe and in a good state of mind.
Assume also your design team sincerely wants to build the best design saving client time and budget.
So where does the irritation come from?
- The unknown, implicit narrative of the business logic behind the scenes
The customer cannot explain the intuitive aesthetics perception with words, and the design, however thoughtful and well-crafted, just doesn’t click. Asking for changes and corrections, the customer, in fact, asks to be understood better. The uncertainty and frustration they experience in the meantime can be unintentionally translated as blaming the designer. This is where productive work usually stops. - A workflow misunderstanding
For the majority of customers, web design creation is a black box. Having no idea of the project route they would leave sharing feedback up until the very last moment when the project is not flexible and revisions are resulting in huge overtimes. Anticipating that the vendor team would try to deliver the perfect result, not including the customer in the design process at all… and will most likely be disappointed. Because the customer is looking for a website reflection of their business, not an excellent layout.
Many promising collaborations have been riddled with those pain points. They don’t have to. A good partnership allows to speak up.
Analyzing years of web design revisions at dops.digital we minimized corrections from our clients down to 20% of what it used to be.
To explain how we optimized the communication with our partners we have created a checklist of the things both designers and clients should work on together. Doesn’t matter if you are a team Client or team Designer, those items can help you build trust and speed up the project pipeline.
You can find that checklist template below the article. Print it out, show it to your colleagues. Don’t let your project be buried under last-minute edits and revisions.
Prepare and Educate
If you don’t come to a gunfight with a knife, you don’t come to the meeting table without a brief.
You are a Designer. You are equipped with:
Internal process guide
Taking a new customer on board at dops.digital we always start with a kickoff meeting. We make sure to introduce the client to our design workflow and project phases. As soon as the work starts, we keep reporting on each stage.
Design stages
A measure of product (in this case, web design) success in the marketplace is how quickly it can get there. Explain to your client how installed workflow helps to get the new website faster to market.
Research on customer industry
And obviously, explore the field of your client’s business. What are the most successful brands? Is there a trade-specific slang? This research alone is not enough for a custom and unique representation of the company but gives you the foundation.
You are a Customer. You draw up:
Business specifics, weaknesses, strengths, cultural diversity
Talking to the design team for the first time usually sounds a lot like an investor pitch. Go beyond that. Let the unusual experiences your business has lived through drive the unique design.
Similar products and competitors
List your “trade neighbors”, highlight what is it that you like about them. Tell your design team what makes you different on the market, and what you and your competitors have in common. The purpose of industry standards for design development is to create an appealing and appropriate image, intuitive to the brand target audience. And that special thing which makes your company different is the cherry on top.
Approved content
Check the gear. What current elements of the brand you want to keep in the new design — logo, mission statement, feature, and product description? Show respect to your design team giving them the content they can work with straight away. The “lorem ipsum” mockups drastically differ from the complete pages with the actual company content. Prepare the copy you want to see on the website and spare everyone from doing the same job twice.
Define and Communicate
Mutually agreed expectations are happy expectations.
Let the responsibilities be know
The designer is responsible for experimenting with trends, keeping the style intact with the brand, and UX and interface in touch with best practices. The designer knows how human psychology navigates. The designer is responsible for speaking out when the customer requests might jeopardize the usability for future product users. The customer is the business logic stakeholder, who knows the target audience from a demographic point of view. These two perspectives do not compete. What makes them conflicting is bias, expressed with statements like “That’s outdated” or “This doesn’t work”. We replace them (and encourage our partners too) with objectives: “This design is too aggressive while you need to look as calm caregivers”, “Those features make us look too much like the competitors”, etc.
Build awareness of who’s who
Who is the contact person on the customer side? Who is the go-to person on the development side? Who is handling the visual assets that can be used in the meantime? Are the vendor team members changing from stage to stage? Most likely the design iterations will be presented to several people on the client team, but someone has to be making final decisions.
Fixate the flexibility of work schedule
Who is the contact person on the customer side? Who is the go-to person on the development side? Who is handling the visual assets that can be used in the meantime? Are the vendor team members changing from stage to stage? Most likely the design iterations will be presented to several people on the client team, but someone has to be making final decisions.
Plan ahead of the time for design revisions
We determine how much time we’ll dedicate to the reviews individually for each project, depending on its size and complexity. If the production phase lasts about 1.5 months, the design revisions will take one week. We plan this week in advance and include it in the project plan. The customers know about the time they will have to review the intermediate results and are prepared to highlight tasks with the highest priority for their business needs.
But also define a round of revision
There’s a revision round and there’s a minor change. The latter is something small and not affecting the team workflow, like switching the photo assets or tint color, it can be handled on the go. The revisions demand an overhaul to some degree. Those edits may take more time than the project itself, increasing the original estimate of price and time several times.
When the customer feels like asking for the correction, the predefined split of the minor changes and overall revisions helps to understand if this is a small byline task or an issue that belongs to the revision phase. Collect all the requested changes in one document accessible and used by both customer and design team, and mark them accordingly.
Focus and Iterate
Eating the elephant one bite at a time.
Set the tempo
At dops.digital we work on weekly sprints:
Monday to Thursday — the creative work on the product;
Thursday evening — we send the results;
Friday morning — processing the customer feedback, discussing issues, putting reaction to them into next week’s plan.
The client knows when the updates are coming in and is ready to assess. This approach allows us to quickly adapt the project to the current business requirements and to deliver on time.
Don’t get distracted by an epiphany
Anyone involved in the project could come up with features out of the scope.
We collect non-urgent ideas into a customer’s wishlist. Once we finish the priority tasks, we carefully analyze it, estimate additional work, and consult with the customer on the business value and cost of proposed changes, before putting the client’s budget in it.
Literally sign-off the results on each stage
When a certain part of graphic design development is complete, both sides of the project need to know it to move on to the next step. And better in writing. If you are sending a draft or a final result of a specific task from the design team — attach a message to let the customer know what they are looking at and what actions are expected.
If you are in charge of evaluating the result — share feedback, critique, or delight in a written form. Having text backup of all decisions and reactions will organize the teams and spare you graphic design revisions later.
The client doesn’t know the design creation workflow, the designer doesn’t know how customer business works. But when they listen and educate each other, set the rules, and agree to play by them, the design revisions stop being the overwhelming and disappointing consequence of hard work, taking the much more appropriate place of iterative feedback on a satisfying collaboration.
These hints have helped us to win for our client. You may find some new ones to add.
We encourage you to invest in building your clear and transparent workflow from both sides, client, and vendor.
Originally published at https://dops.digital.
