A Good Lesson in Defining Website Design Requirements….From a Cake?!?!

Posted By : Gary Galvin   Posted On : June 16th, 2010
Topics : Design, Galvin Processes, Interface Design

If you have read our posts I hope you see that we are very particular about documenting everything and getting approval before work starts.  That means for design too.  We don’t even start a design until the requirements are defined, wire frames created and mood boards approved.  Why?  To make sure we utilize the budget accurately and meet expectations.  It is an expensive and time consuming mistake when a design is created only for a client to tell us it is not right.  This could hurt the relationship and the project.  With all the upfront documentation we are confident we will nail the design in it’s first deliverable.

Well, earlier this week one of the Galvin Technologies employees came back from maternity leave.  We were excited to have her back and decided to have a small gathering in the conference room with cake.  So when we ordered the cake we mentioned we wanted a chocolate cake with “Welcome Back” written on it.  Easy enough requirement, right?  Well, when the cake was picked up it read “Well Come Back” on three separate lines.

This is a perfect example of documenting the requirements first.  If the cake was a website project we would make sure we documented that the cake was chocolate and to read “Well Come Back”.  We would then hand that requirement to the client only for them to inform us that it is to say “Welcome Back”.  We would have made that quick change and the client would sign off.  Total change time = 1 minute.

But in this situation the person who made the cake assumed it was to read “Well Come Back” so they took the production of the cake all the way to delivery only for the client to be disappointed and tell them it is not right.  Total time to fix this mistake = 1.5 hours + cost of the cake.  A much more expensive mistake plus we plan not go back there although the cake tasted great.  Design is crucial so document it.

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