Ask web designers – any designers come to that – about design by committee and you’ll receive universally intolerant and contemptuous responses. There are all sorts of reasons why trying to take too active a role in dictating the design will turn a design creative against you, especially if multiple people have a hand in it.
What is “design by committee”?
To illustrate, perhaps a cartoon does the best job of explaining.
How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell – The Oatmeal
This is for all the web designers out there who have suffered as I have suffered.
OK, so you’re probably having a chuckle at that cartoon and thinking “that couldn’t happen to me”. Think again and read The 7 Things Every Web Designer Dreads to Hear From Their Clients.
Not all feedback is constructive. Design by committee is almost always the worst of all possible worlds, to paraphrase Voltaire. It invites a whole group of people to pitch in and contribute to a discussion about aesthetics, whereas in truth the whole concept of design needs to be treated in terms of form, function, and, above all, target audience needs.
I’d always be prepared to answer the question “Why?” if you’re planning on giving feedback to your designer. There always have to be valid business reasons and justification for making design changes and nothing will irritate a designer more than taking his or her carefully crafted efforts and critiquing and changing them until they bear little or no resemblance to the first draft. That’s not to say that refining a design is out of the question. It’s just that there are, as with all things, good and bad ways of going about it.
Avoiding design by committee
The way in which we at PENNInk Productions go about avoiding such differences of opinion is to engage with the client from the very earliest stages of a project. With web design, which can be very subjective (who doesn’t have an opinion about design?), we use a process that eliminates any question of design by committee. To engage with all the key stakeholders who have a decision in the final design, we use a collaborative design workshop to flesh out the details of what the important elements of a design should be, on which all the stakeholders must agree.
Once an agreed approach is decided, we consider avatars for the client’s target audience(s). This is vital in establishing what the target audience needs are in terms of form and function. There’s little point in pleasing the client if the intended design isn’t fit for purpose because it doesn’t appeal to the target audience. That is a one way ticket to failure, not success.
Now that we have established what both the client and the target audience preferences are, it makes the task of producing designs much easier because we effectively have everyone’s buy-in from the start of the actual design process. It both reduces the time taken to produce the initial design and time in making revisions, allowing for a quicker (and therefore less expensive) process from both our and the client’s perspective.
The bottom line
Design by committee is ineffective, laborious, patronising and ultimately uneconomical. Every time someone puts his or her oar in to change a part of the design, it is costing the project more in both time and budget.
The solution? Stay focused. Concentrate on the target audience needs and business justification for the design and ensure that it meets the business and target audience needs. Aesthetics are but one component in the mix and design is never wholly and solely about aesthetics.
Edward Solomon has over 30 years’ experience in project management, technical education, computer networking, web design and development and is a Digital Business Consultant for PENNInk Productions Ltd.
