The ideal project would not have a deadline for my taste. I would love to have all the time in the world to design and develop a website nirvana that all users could navigate through effortlessly. This utopia, however, is unrealistic. First and foremost, the client would like to have a web presence sometime this century. Secondly, they have a budget and can’t afford the bottomless well of development a project like that would have.
The flip side to this is having a deadline before the entire scope of the project is realized and before proper expectations are set. These types of projects are far more dangerous than the scenario above. These types of projects are rife with problems.
What does one of these deadline first projects look like? Follow me kids… I’ll show you. (I promise no Oompa-Loompas or a trippy boat rides. Gene Wilder rocks by the way… wow – tangent – sorry.)
Most likely these projects start out with a client who has a great idea. They have thought a lot about this idea and have put a lot into the business plan to make this new idea come to life. Secondly, they have identified that they need a web presence, and because they are far from experts in this area, they come to you.
They go through their business plan at a high level with you and tell you some of the objectives they have for their website. You walk them through a very thorough questionnaire (put together by a very smart design company 
) and get as many answers as you can to provide a few mock-ups and a high level cost estimate.
What’s that noise… sounds like a loose wheel. Anyway, the client flips over one of the designs you made and wants to start immediately. You are excited, you won the work and you are moving into development.
So you create an outline and calendar to make sure you have the proper time built in to do an Information Architecture (IA) study, a card sorting activity and a wireframe of the rest of the site so you have a better handle of the scope of the project. You also want to make sure this new site is usable and helps your new client achieve their business objectives.
Before you have the ability to share this outline and calendar with your client they come to you and tell you that they shared your designs with their marketing team and they started creating campaigns around the new site. Whoa… did you feel that shimmy? What is that noise?!?
You start asking the client to participate in some of the IA studies you want to conduct and they tell you that there is a lot of things moving right now and there might not be time to do any IA studies at this time. “We can always get to that later. Why don’t you start building out the home page so we can see what it looks like in a browser.”
You start constructing your home page and you get a message from your client… “Good news we got our booth graphics done! Did I forget to tell you we are going to a trade show in 30 days and we need the site done before we leave?” OMG the wheels just fell off. Hold on this is going to be a messy ride!
Well… choice time… do you swing the door open, jump, tuck, and roll? Or do you press on and try to help your new client land this thing? (for the purposes of this post we are going with option B)
Now you are staring at a deadline that is going to take every waking minute of your time to reach. In order to get some reality around this news you just received, you set up a meeting with the client to see where you can shave some scope. This first meeting is what I like to call the denial meeting.
Your client will tell you that it is no big deal; there should be plenty of time to get this done by the show. You make some suggestions on where they can cut some scope – they are reluctant to do it because the site needs to be next to perfect for the show. Again, they tell you not to worry about it. They are going to get you help with content and they have a plan where they can get more.
Do you smell that? It smells like something is burning. So you press on. The work becomes a grind. Curve balls are coming at you left and right. Instead of shrinking scope, your client tries to increase it… “Can we hook the site up to a Content Management System?” “How about some Flash that streams our mission statement video?”
The work you are doing is now taking twice as long as expected because you client keeps changing their mind as you make your way to the trade show date. You promise yourself that all the short cuts and hacks you needed to put in will get fixed after the show is over (not really believing that will happen). You get this website mess to a point of acceptability for your client and you push it live. It doesn’t really work the way you wanted it, the information flow is a bit slap-dash, and there are some errors that still linger.
But it’s out there in time for the show. Your client is more happy that the website is out there when they needed it than what the result of the site is. They spin it to their partners that there is going to be a lot of improvements coming. They pat you on the back and say that after the show they want to talk about the next phase of the site. With a wink they say that big things are coming.
This, my friends, is not that far from actual events a lot of us in this field have experienced. These fire drill type projects zap the life out of any good UX-designers/developers. It is vitally important that you communicate the importance of realistic and proper deadlines. Sometimes it is difficult to explain the amount of time it takes to do something right. A lot of times your clients won’t understand what it takes to build an online presence that is usable and friendly to their customers. They most likely will try to minimize your role and effort to get what they want sooner and cheaper. They don’t understand that “someone else has done it so it can’t be that hard; you just put it there like that” is easier said than done.
Our jobs in these situations is to explain, in terms they will understand, what it takes to build their awesome website. We need to show them how the process of our job works. We also need to show our clients why proper deadlines help them out as well. We need to communicate what there role is going to be in the development of their website. We need to show them what deliverables they have on their plates and how the timeliness of those deliverables affect our progress. If you can, show your client an example of what happens to projects with rushed deadlines. Show them the original mock-ups and the finished result. Explain all the corners that were cut how those shortcuts effect the performance of that site.
Before you get headlong into a project set up some realistic time lines. Use a calender to show when deliverables are needed and when milestones are going to be met. This way your client has a visual timeline. You have the ability to show them what happens to that timeline when new scope is introduced or when new deadlines are introduced.
In the end, your client may not like what you are saying at the time, but they will appreciate it in the long run. And if they don’t, maybe they aren’t the type of client you want to work for.
For instance this very real example shows a very confusing UX while trying to change a password for a login to an online application. (I am not going to reveal the company that had this experience. They have since come to the light side and now embrace usability and user testing.)
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