Notes · 30 May 2020
Web design when the brief keeps changing
Half my projects this quarter have been re-scoped mid-engagement. A few rules I have found useful.
Half the projects on the studio’s books this quarter have been re-scoped mid-engagement. The clients are not at fault. Their businesses look different from how they looked in February. Some are pivoting product. Some are pivoting audience. Some are pivoting from “in person” to “online” in three weeks, with a website that was sized for the old version of their company.
A few rules that have made the work survivable.
Take the first two days of every project to write down what is currently true about the client’s business, on a single page. Not what they want it to be. What it is, on the day the work starts. Re-read this page at the start of every meeting. If the page has changed, the project may have changed.
Quote in two halves. The first half is the work that does not depend on the rest of the company being settled: the type system, the colour palette, the basic page templates. The second half is the work that does depend on it: the marketing pages, the case studies, the homepage. The first half can be done at any time. The second half waits.
Resist the temptation to redesign the homepage three times. Most clients, mid-pivot, will not know what their homepage should say for another two months. A homepage redesigned to a guess about month two of a pivot will need to be redesigned again at month four. Better to launch with a placeholder homepage and revisit it once the company has stabilised.
Write more, draw less. Most of the conversations the studio is having right now are about positioning, not about visual design. The visual design will follow the positioning, but only if the positioning is settled. A two-page written brief about who the company now serves is more useful, mid-pivot, than five pages of Figma.
The work coming out of the studio in the last six weeks has been some of the strongest I have seen. I think this is because the constraints have forced clarity. Every choice has had to justify itself. There has been no room for the soft pretty work that fills out a brand kit but does not really do anything. We have had to ship.
Reading that has shaped how I run pivot projects: Marty Neumeier’s Zag, April Dunford’s Obviously Awesome, and Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup. The companion post on rapid pivots and small brands covers the brand-system side of the same conversation.