hyalineskies

Since I began my lowly experience design internship in May, my skills have been tested primarily upon a client base that I hadn’t had access to before. Nearly all of the company’s clients are large corporations, and the majority of my work has been for true enterprise-class corporations. In my time there, I’ve been a silent observer of company/client interaction; on an information architecture / web development project a few weeks ago, I watched a last-minute (less than four days to site launch) client demand leave us with no choice but to drastically change the theme and purpose of the site, leaving me to scrap nearly all of my original wireframes and draw new ones on a dry-erase board in a brainstorming session with the site’s visual designer.

Meanwhile, the coders were frantically trying to adapt to the changes, as the past two weeks had been spent hacking out a home-brew CMS with the ability to support thousands of hits per minute. With the client changes actually destroying all of the code I had written for the project, I felt both devastated and annoyed. I don’t mind working under pressure; in fact, I love it, but I hate working on something for nothing. There was nothing I could do: with enterprise-level, large-sum projects, you’re effectively whoring yourself out to the man.

It’s situations like these that cause creatives to become anti-establishment; after all, enterprise clients present a unique legal snafu, heavy bandwidth demands, and a bureaucracy so complex that one becomes entangled in a sea of red tape impossible to navigate. These restrictions unique to the enterprise — plus business-degree executives believing that they know design better than you do — easily kills the creative flame like an ocean extinguishes a candle.

The damage to the designer’s free spirit is lethal: an expansive, bright mind becomes bitter and aggressive, secretly wishing for some way to subvert client authority. If one were to propose the idea that the designer is at fault, that person would surely be screamed at with the only comprehensible phrases being “client”, “doesn’t understand”, and “educate.” When any client, big or small, pops the creative’s thought balloons with an unfathomable interface idea or super-garish colour “recommendation”, the first retaliatory action is to declare the client ignorant. After all, what does a guy with an Economics degree know about design? (I don’t know, maybe you should ask me.) Although a business executive in a suit and tie may not know Akzidenz Grotesk from the fatal four-car pileup during rush hour, their restructuring of contextual priority is usually founded in some type of corporate logic. Most likely, although their changes may seem horrible to those in the design community, their common demographic won’t bat an eye. That arrogant bastard in a three-piece suit is responsible for the success of the project, not you. If you make his changes and his site ends up being a failure, you’re in a good position to say your I-told-you-so’s.

The difference in perspective between client and creative is quite nicely laid out by Michael Bierut of Design Observer: we are, as designers, trained to be absolutely, obsessively analytical of our aesthetic surroundings. Just yesterday I noticed an inadvertent double-space in an American Apparel poster on Liberty; to most people, things like this go entirely unnoticed. To the designer, the devil is in the details: to anyone in other professions, it’s generally the primary message that is of utmost significance. In the case of web design for enterprise clients, as long as the site is usable and the functionality prominent, they don’t care. If the message seems useless to the designer, don’t forget that you’re most likely in the smallest of minorities.

That said, the battle with an enterprise client is not one in which the client is invulnerable. The problem in attempting to “educate the client” is just that: you’re asserting superiority over a client who feels invincible due to his or her status at a multibillion-dollar organisation, and this David vs. Goliath attitude unfortunately ends with Goliath winning in a real-world scenario. Screaming about the client’s ignorance and stupidity is equally stupid in itself. Loathing and sneakily plotting e-revenge is counterproductive. With that, I must grimly state that the title of this post is a honeypot, and the trick is not to subvert the enterprise at all: pushing design-positive changes into an enterprise website is not subversion. It’s not revolutionary. The key to pushing enterprise change is compromise, with a bit of open-mindedness so hypocritically absent in today’s creative mentality.

The restricted perspective of restriction itself

Web design is inherently about compromise: the designer is under the strict limitations of web standards, image formats, and cross-browser rendering difficulties. Sites have strict navigational guidelines and UI elements that must be analysed and implemented by information architects. Coding requires absolutely strict conformity to maintain syntax and efficiency. Even the visual aspects of web design are dominated by resolution disparity and poor monitor calibration standards, not to mention the traditional guidelines of good graphic design. The real beauty in web design is the fact that we somehow create beauty in a state of oppression unlike any other medium. We take an absurd set of guidelines, and, through a compromise between the rules and our creative vision, we create.

When presented with this perspective on web design, it seems almost laughable when we are angered over client restrictions. By accepting client changes and not reeling in shock, we can place ourselves in a position that is infinitely more powerful than our own arrogance. We, in the face of compromise, can build semi-conforming concepts. Does the client want more priority on promotional media? Even if it hurts the original site’s vision and message, even if it seems pointless, it can still be functionally and visually graceful. When a recent client took an originally-planned two-field form and made it into a seven-field form, I worked closely with the designer to build a form structure that maintained an efficient user experience. (The site, which will remain undisclosed, is wildly successful.) Instead of balking at the limitation, I embraced it. The end result was satisfying on both the client end and the agency end.

Designing the compromise

There are times when an enterprise client (or any client, for that matter) can come up with something awfully bone-headed; usually, these client recommendation occur when they think they know what a common user wants on their site (when their claims rarely have any foundation in data.) For example, if the client was meaningless advertising to contextually irrelevant products, it’s your job to compromise. There are both the business and design processes going on here:

Client These promotions wll help me sell less visible or slow-selling products by increasing exposure.

Designer This page will be garish, cluttered, and akin to navigating your way through a packed crowd. No one will find relevant information.

However, our key word here is compromise. Be open-minded and try to look at it from the client’s perspective: what is their goal? It’s a question we consistently ask a site user, and it only makes sense to ask the same question to the enterprise. If you can’t answer that question, ask. Only once you understand their purpose for an inane choice do you then respond to it. What you say in your response, though, makes all the difference. You know what the client wants to do, and it’s at this point that a designer wishing only to “educate the client” would rant about user confusion, poor navigability, and how the site’s creative vision is twisted. A compromising designer would instead propose a simple, context-based solution to the problem, backing up the client’s requested changes with site metrics and existing usability studies. You’ve effectively tied user experience, profitability, and design into one method, and in doing so have effectively tied the worlds of business and design together into a mutually agreeable solution. Why compromise through experience design seems to evade a lot of designers is unknown to me, especially so given the close connections between business/client relations in today’s industry. These alternatives not only leave everyone at a mutually agreeable conclusion, they render the entire design process drastically more efficient.

The worst type of compromise

This compromise, however, seems predictably challenging to the creative mind, and it is inevitably harder to comprehend when the enterprise wins out in the end. If an enterprise client has a horrible idea from a design perspective and you’ve attempted to show the client meaningful alternatives through metrics, design, and usability, yet they’re insistent upon having it done the poor way, there’s unfortunately nothing you can do. Compromise is a two-way street, and if the client is literally tyrannical, refer them to someone else if possible or suck it up and produce otherwise. There are times in many projects where you must deliver client needs, and it is inevitable that you will end up vindicated in the end (as traffic may decrease or future usability studies may show the site to be awful, et cetera.)

Sure, the end result of enterprise compromise seems to have an expected value that has drastically lower yields than full creative freedom, but it defeats a lot of the bitterness that can develop through more stubborn methods of business. By showing some type of care for client concerns in their own corporate language, the communication between client and designer — and eventually the communication from the site to the user — improves to a point previously intangible by art director arrogance and the following lack of corporate cooperation. (Then, at the end of it all, maybe it’s really not compromise: it may be, instead, guerrilla warfare, breaking down the bureaucracy piece by piece … well, that’s for our futures to decide. Until then, design with compromise.)