Design concepts guide

When the web was young, the “waterfall” process of development organically developed as a way content-makers and designers could push content to the engineering teams to be published on the web. The waterfall process of content development is linear: one team completes their tasks and passes to another team who completes their tasks and then pushes to another team, and so on, until the final product is realized.

Broadly, this process was an adaptation of the traditional, factory-like print media workflow from newspapers and magazines. In this process, the editorial team would write and edit text content, push it to a design team to lay the text out on a page and work in the illustrations and photographs, and then the design team would push the layouts to the printer, who would implement the design by setting the printing presses to churn out the final product.

Of course, this is impossible. Even in a completely controlled environment where there will never be any changes or revisions to content, each group doesn’t know every constraint or need of the next group, so they will of course sometimes produce work that causes problems or questions for future groups down the line.

Plus, that perfect environment is a fantasy; it does not exist. Changes and revisions happen all the time. In newspapers, if something happened to change the headlines in the early morning edition, editors would rush to write new headlines and article text; design would freak out a little to source a photo and set the text, and the printer would have to scramble to reframe the entire front page to include this new article. But what happens to the original content? Where does it go? The printers need to know, and they also have ideas ­— after all, they understand the mechanics of the page better than anyone. They need to be able to talk to design and editorial quickly in order to make content decisions. The three groups absolutely had to work together to get changes made in a way that worked for the newspapers’ readers. And they had to do it fast.

So, in traditional print media, the groups had to do overlapping work; they had to talk to each other. It’s the same for design. Design teams can’t just “hand off” designs to the people who will implement them. Whether your team is developing print media, a digital product like a website, a real-life object like a kiosk, or a service like a benefits advisory board, working with the people who will implement it is crucial to the success of your project. No matter how clear you think you’ve been, no matter how top-notch your implementation team is, there will be questions that you need to work out together.

The design phase is analogous to the communications phase during discovery: the discovery team must effectively communicate their findings to their leadership and partners, before the discovery stage can be considered complete. Until the design team works with the implementation team to conduct a small pilot and help that team create an implementation plan, their design work is not done, because the team has not set the design(s) they crafted up for success; the designs have been carefully, painstakingly crafted and then shoved out into the world without support or thought of sustainability.