Thursday June 26 7:4 AM
Ever wonder how giant corporations with loads of money to spend end up with crappy design? Here's how it happens. I was talking with a client yesterday about how it was possible that I could design websites that were cheaper and better-looking than some big-name companies have. My response is that I can't believe that all big-name companies don't have crappy web design due to committees, beaurocracies, and ego-driven advertising agencies who don't know the first thing about interactive design.

A typical mega-corporation design project goes something like this:

1. The need for an interactive project is identified and outlined by the company.


2. The company decides that the importance of the project dictates that they hire an outside agency who has convinced them they have the experience to pull off said project. The decision-maker chooses the agency whose account executive has the best tickets to the local sporting events and delegates the project to a committee.


3. The agency quotes a ridiculously large sum, which convinces the company decision-maker that the agency must be competent.


4. The agency spends much of the sum on overpaying its account executives and their expense accounts which include the best tickets to the local sporting events.


5. A round of meetings is attended by all of the five or six principal players, all of whom are billing the entire cost of the two-hour meeting, first-class plane tickets, and five-star hotels to the client.


6. The agency subcontracts the design to a print designer who claims they can do web design. Perhaps they can. It won't matter either way.


7. The company gets the initial designs and sends it to a committee for evaluation.


8. There are no standards for how committee members are chosen, and each member's voice is equal. The design is sanitized and eviscerated from sometimes contradictory input by competing committee members and their individual agendas. One person dislikes purple and another likes green, so the color scheme is arbitrarily changed.


9. The designer attempts to include the changes communicated by the account representative, but is confused by the contradictory changes. They were not one of the five or six principal players and did not rate plane tickets or hotel stays.


10. The agency account executive tries to explain to the company committee why several of the changes will not work. Words like 'synergy' and 'proprietary creative process' are used, but only in the vaguest way possible. If those words fail, the account executive may resort to technical-sounding sentence fragments such as 'Web 3.0' and 'the limitations of open source'.


11. Meanwhile, the agency account executive continues treating the company decision-maker to local sporting events where they talk about the project only briefly. "It is going really well," the agency account executive says, closing the discussion by making plans to attend the next local sporting event.


12. Repeat steps 6 through 11 until the subcontractor moves to New York to become a fashion designer. The agency hires another subcontractor who recognizes that the project is so fubared that they cannot fix it without a total redesign. The agency is already over their budget and timeline due to aforementioned account executives' expense accounts, and directs the subcontractor to 'just get it launched'.


13. The company finally shows the project to an actual decision-maker (who has been attending local sporting events instead of the committee meetings). The decision-maker recognizes that the project is crappy and hard to use. The account executive explains that it has already been approved by the company committee and is currently over budget so no significant changes may be made.


14. Decision-maker realizes that the agency is not a good fit and begins accepting bids from other agencies who have spent large portions of their expense accounts trying to get their foot in the door.
    
15. Repeat from step 3.


16. When the project deadline passes and the project launches, the decision-maker justifies the enormous expense by pointing to the interactive efforts of other large corporations that are similarly crappy. The decision-maker may actually use the enormous expense as a supporting argument that the project is, in fact, well-designed.

OK, maybe that's not exactly how it happens. Sometimes golf trips are used in place of local sporting events.