Dear Fed up of Bog Standards

Bear with me. I feel your pain, yet I am going to start at the hardest place possible for you.

With you and your team and its clarity on quality standards and guidelines.

I assume you have gotten this right. I just know that to truly prove a product – in this case a website – has fallen far beneath quality standards – is to show how clearly you have laid out your intentions:

1. In your RfP
2. In any brand or design guidelines shared during selection
3. In your User Experience (UX) Discovery workshops
4. (Critical) In how consistently your group has been in any subsequent design decisions or approval meetings, i.e., before you saw wireframes, mock-ups, and prototypes

Although design has many technical aspects and well-defined processes, there is always the weather system of Taste and Subjectivity to negotiate as you move between ideation and development.

Also, creative output is a breeding ground for changing views and expectations, so although most good design teams add some contingency into their design timelines and budgets to deal with evolving designs, it can get too chaotic for them to hit quality markers that are ever moving.

Now, I am going to assume the above is done, and I can take a lot of what you have written as on or near the reality of things. So, take heart. Get Savi help is at hand.

Find what is stable and high quality in what you have seen. You say your agency has been good in the past. Even if you can locate certain layouts, palettes and mock-ups that represent the way you need things to be, you can treat these as your foundation and highlight to your supplier where they are getting things right now.

I think next, in your next round of feedback, you should gather all the negative points of feedback, yet before you share these, attribute them to themes or headlines of feedback and only share those with your supplier for the next summit meeting. Designers can simply become snow-blind by the avalanche of things they are getting wrong even if they felt on track during Discovery.

It is your right to ask about your agency’s design capacity and capability, and about their current processes and problems. Escalation meetings with supplier leads get very mature when you allow some airtime for the actual challenges an agency is facing at any given point in time.

Whereas you are not paying to help them solve their internal problems, it may help you with leverage. A super quick scenario:

Let’s say you have a suspicion your agency are simply down numbers and passing work to people not involved at Discovery stage. Evidence – all the names on the design team have changed in recent weeks. With care, it is in your gift to pose this challenge to them. and ask what this is linked to: urgencies elsewhere, team leavers, or to an assumption that more junior designers could do the work downstream of Discovery. Here, with your agency, you can request remediations to the actual problems, not to simply receive well-framed platitudes to your increasingly violent feedback.

I have been firm with you here as I am a big believer in the intelligent client – the team that knows how to get success out of suppliers in the smartest ways possible.

Let me close by offering you solace. Quality is quality and you are paying for it or expected to pay for it in future. If it is simply not good enough for you, how as you say can it ever be good enough for your customers or users? Ultimate that is your judgement call, to stay and fight, or walk away.

[I have deliberately not shared words on walking away from your agency and strategies to do this safely. I do not think you are there just yet. But if you are, see entry 26 – we cover this there.]

Good luck!