It is a known fact that building a website involves the entire team’s active participation including — UX Designer, Developer, Project manager, Client Other stakeholders.
All the members of the design team have equal rights to making decisions on what works best to deliver a great website. Let it be creative input from the designer, technical input from the developer or resourceful strategy given by the project manager, each member’s valuable input is pivotal to the success of the project.
However, very rarely does it happen that all the members and stakeholders are available at all times to sit together and discuss each and every aspect of the design.
Even if all the stakeholders participate by working remotely, every individual has a mind of their own and understands things differently.
The designer might understand the client’s requirement in a certain way which might be far from the actual intention of the client. If this gets passed on to the developer and the project continues the ultimate result is a completely new website that doesn’t satisfy the original requirements of the client.
How terrified would you be if you worked hard on a project but it resulted in unsatisfying work?
Every project has limited time and a tight budget.
Time is money, doing unsatisfying and time consuming work equals paying a huge price.
“Building a House” analogy
Let’s say you decide to build your dream home.
You hire an architect, interior designer and construction workers. You could also take suggestions from your family members for what colour their rooms should be painted in.
Now let’s make it even harder. You, the architect, the designer, and your family are all in different locations and you contact each other via phone/Skype.
You take all the input and suggestions from the rest of the team and translate it to the construction workers in the best way possible but through a phone call. The workers build the house and send pictures to you for feedback. You forward these pictures to the rest of the team and then there’s nightmare on Elm’s street. It doesn’t resemble what any of you had in mind for a dream house. There needs to be a lot of changes done. So you collect all the feedback from your team and get back to the construction workers on the phone to convey your feedback. This loop goes on and on.
Understanding what each website design team member’s intention or vision of the way their website should look and feel is something of the same sort. The designer can feel exactly the way you felt building your dream house.
When guesswork starts, productivity decreases.
The designer first creates the design template and after it gets implemented by the developer, the website needs to be reviewed. This goes on for several drafts.
During the course of reviewing and changing, there is bound to be a point where the designer has to figure out what are the changes the other stakeholders want to see.
When the designer starts doing guess work, he has to give in to trial and error method. Once this begins, the project runs into an endless loop and no valuable output is delivered fast.
Designing a website like any other project can’t be perfected overnight, it needs brainstorming, proper reviewing and regular updation.
Is proper planning really enough?
Many a times you feel that proper planning before beginning to work on something is already half the battle won.
Although this may be true with most things, when it comes to designing a website, there is a lot at stake.
- There is only a limited amount of time you get to finish designing and launching your website.
- Each member’s approval and validation is a must.
- Each member of the design team with all the stakeholders has to maintain a good camaraderie.
The client briefing session goes great, you’ve done all your planning and decided how you’re going to approach designing the website,
but the unpredictability factor in designing websites is too high to think that just proper planning is going to help you yield the right results.
To get your website reviewed and to get every member’s feedback and validation could take way more time than what was in the plan.
Who are the victims of innumerable iterations?
The designer of course is going to be majorly affected no doubt.
The designer is the one with a virtual paint brush and the more he has to redo the work the more stress and frustration builds into the them. Although some people tend to work well under pressure, a web designer more often than not, will get overwhelmed with the innumerable iterations and not be able to give their best.
The project manager more or less holds the entire project together and needs to make sure that all the work happens within a time frame. He needs to contemplate how to deliver the project with perfection and save time for maximum productivity.
The developer is doing redundant coding work to implement all the design changes and a lot of time is lost here.
The client and other stakeholders need to wait for a long time before they can visually see the reflections of all their ideas and expectations on screen as a live website.
The innumerable iterations of making design changes causes all members of the design team to suffer one way or the other.
How about keeping everyone at sync
With working remotely comes its numerous challenges. However, with the technological advancements we have today, there should be a way to be able to work remotely and yet with the exact same finesse and accuracy of working together around the same table.
As sophisticated or far fetched as it may seem. The web designing world never lets you down. With all the new feedback collaboration tools, you can kiss all your time management problems goodbye.
Feedback collaboration tools let you share live and real-time changes made on your websites with all the design team members and stakeholders. There is constant reviewing and feedback provided using comments and annotations on the live website. The changes to be reflected are quickly conveyed live. Imagine how fast a designer can obtain the required approval and validation.
To make things even better..
Visual Inspector is one tool which is great for feedback collaboration but the ultimate pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is that, Visual Inspector allows you to actually “Make” live changes on your website.
So think about it,
- You share the Url of the live website to the entire design team to get their approval.
- Whoever it has been shared with has access to make changes to the website.
- All the changes are live and real-time so an immediate feedback is provided.
- The annotation and commenting features make sure that no member’s input, opinions or suggestions are disregarded.
Visual Inspector — not only comments but also make changes to live website. No coding required — https://www.canvasflip.com/visual-inspector/
Wrapping it up
A lot of planning could have gone into the project but because of latency in delivering it, there are chances of going over the budget and losing precious time that could have been put to beneficial use.
So to conclude, in delivering a website that perfectly captures the collective contributions of all members of the team needs to be managed well in terms of time. A tool like Visual Inspector certainly does that for you.
How have you been managing time with your design projects? Have you faced similar problems. I would love to know your thoughts in the comment section below.
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