Lesson of Importance, Design Within Technology

The Story

I'm a Chief Technology Officer and I have sinned. How? I used to think creatives are the laziest bunch, they add very little-to-no value to the digital technology process. This my story of how I am wrong and was majorly humbled.

There was an relatively idle period in early 2024 after team Delos has just delivered a custom ERP to a fashion retailer. We were waiting to start on an upcoming mobile project yet to be closed won. In between those projects, a friend (creative agency owner) reached out seeking help. Their client wants to launch a company website but the problem is they couldn't do website development themselves yet. The creative agency is focused mostly on marketing advertising services i.e. social media management, branding, graphic design.

This opportunity was really interesting for me, we get to try something new and it wasn't totally outside our field. Since 2019, Delos had always specialized on custom software development. The likes of mobile apps, ERPs and system integrations. Our core competencies, our bread-and-butter. Company websites should be chicken easy. What could go wrong? Apparently, a lot.

For starters, what seemed like straightforward work (my initial estimate of 1 month) ended up taking almost 3 months! What's more surprising... the actual development only took 2 weeks. The requirements were: 1. sitemap of ~30 pages/sections 2. both desktop & mobile responsive. There was no ux/ui designs yet, only raw Adobe Illustrator files and visual assets. I'm a technologist and I didn't grasp the depths of design creatives and its world.

Lessons Learnt

What ended up happening the biggest time spent was on: 1. getting the finalized designs approved by client. An experienced senior lead designer can easily identify and avoid major pitfalls. End of the day, an experienced designer should size estimates on website designs. Somewhat similar to how technologists such as myself estimate solution design/builds. If the client raises an opinion which goes against the project branding / design objectives, the feedback must challenged for clarity and avoiding misalignment. As design can hold a range of subjectivity, it is essential someone on the team has the ability to effectively shepherd multiple stakeholders towards the (design) outcome. Limiting the maximum number of revision loops (review <> revision <> approval) is also necessary to prevent stalled progress.

The second biggest time spent was on: 2. getting website designs finalized internally. Website design files had to be in Figma because developers rely on it as the handover tool from digital product (ux/ui) designers as well. Another reason why tech teams could work faster in Figma is because numeric values such as height, width, fonts, margins, etc of web components are very well-defined there. The translation from Adobe Illustrator was incomplete, several visual assets were missing and we didn't catch them earlier on. Working in a joint project via partnership with creative / design studios, a framework to clearly separate scope & boundaries is essential. Without this, the project can degrade into unproductive finger pointing situations. Let's focus on delivering the best client outcomes!

After the project, I have such a new profound respect for creatives and designers. Their craft cannot be taken lightly and it literally shows.