I recently had a really depressing experience. I was asked to work on a very cool application that focused on my favorite subject. That’s not the depressing part. That part was awesome.
Despite a lot of misgivings, I agreed to use the waterfall development process and design a lot of stuff up front, because that’s what the client wanted. Don’t get me wrong. They were doing some development work on the back end, but the goal was to figure out the entire application UX and feature set, wireframe it, and get a visual design done before starting work on anything customer-facing.
The application was quite large and had several different areas. I specifically designed it so that many of the features were modular, which meant that the development team could leave out whole chunks of the UI without ruining the application. They could then add more feature modules in as they finished them, which would theoretically allow them to launch as soon as they had just a few modules finished. Even though we were using a waterfall method, I didn’t want to design something that had to be absolutely 100% finished and built before it was usable. Basically, I was giving them the option to be agile in their development process, if they chose to, even if everything was designed up front.
After a few months of design, we had a great product roadmap, a list of features we ideally wanted in version 1.0, a list of features that would be acceptable for 1.0 (still FAR more than a MVP), lots of fully interactive wireframes, a gorgeous visual design (not done by me, of course), and a lot of data ready to go on the back end. We had also burned through our design budget, so I turned everything over to the developers and moved on to other things.
After several months, the very first version of the product shipped. This is the depressing part. It included exactly 0% of the original design. That’s right. Not a single element I’d designed made it into the first version of the product. Unfortunately, because all the design work had been done up front, I had no idea why the company made the decisions they had made. Of course, if I had been involved with the project all the way through, I could have stripped down the design in a way that at least tried to stay true to the original vision of the product. Instead, it came across as something that had never really been designed at all.
Oddly, there’s a part of me that’s happy that they did what they did. After all, they ended up releasing a MUCH smaller version of the product than we had originally envisioned. I’m not sure if it’s a Minimum Viable Product – only time will tell if it’s viable, after all – but it has many fewer features than we originally envisioned.
But, in another way, I’m sad. If I could have convinced them to go this small at the very beginning of the project, I could have designed their Minimum Viable Product in a lot less time, and, I think, with a lot better result than they got doing it on their own. More importantly, we could then have worked together to build out new features based on learning from the MVP, and we probably still would have had some design budget left to eventually implement that gorgeous visual design.
I guess my lesson from all of this is that I need to be stricter with companies who want a giant, fully fleshed-out product all designed for them at the beginning of the process. I need to be clearer that they’d be better off designing something very small and immediately implementable and then working from there. And I need to encourage them to spread the design budget out over a longer period of time so that they are never left without design resources. Either that, or I need to let go of my designs once they’ve been handed over to the client and acknowledge that they get to do (or not do) anything they want with them. I just find that really depressing.