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I regret my website redesign

mtlynch.io

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Re: I regret my website redesign

#711

Post by josefx »

lmm wrote: post #586
jokethrowaway wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd bet you a large sum of money this agency used Agile. Agile is not a guarantee of deliverables you care about. There is a lot of useless stuff you can deliver.

> I'd bet you a large sum of money this agency used Agile. They probably said the word "agile" a lot and then continued doing something else, that seems to be the usual pattern. > Agile is not a guarantee of deliverables you care about. There is a lot of useless stuff you can deliver. Which is why it's the product owner's responsibility to prioritise.

> Which is why it's the product owner's responsibility to prioritise.

The company didn't seem to have issues prioritizing the authors tasks into no mans land. So they seem to have that part down great already. However I find the consistent two week deliveries early on a bit disturbing, in my experience two weeks is exactly one sprint and fixing deliverables to that time window means that you can't really do any agile planing with it, your team just has to accept that this work has to be done and can't give random work that seems to pop up every now and then the attention it deserves. To be really agile and allow your sprint planing to reflect that you shouldn't promise anything in time spans less than two months.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#712

Post by tomaskafka »

allenu wrote: post #414
bequanna wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which absolutely makes me think this was a well thought out con designed to prey on those types of fears and maximize the value extracted from the mark. Those lottery phone scams out of Jamaica which target the elderly in the US are almost the exact same scam as what was described here. Promise something, get them to send money, don’t deliver, tell them you need more time/more money. Keep repeating until the mark wal…

Maybe "well thought out con" is a little strong here. I see it as more likely the consulting firm has learned this behavior over time and it has rewarded them well. I imagine that if they're normally dealing with large contracts, those companies footing the bill are probably easier to string along like this. Just do enough and promise enough that they keep you on and only budge when they get more serious about potent…

I agree, and it takes force to break them out of this behavior. I know of a guy, who forced the contractors to break down the wall they just built because they didn't let him inspect the place behind the wall before enclosing it, as promised in the contract. He knew that if he lets this slide, they'll keep doing it.

An analogy here would be forcing the agency designers to completely delete any speculative redesign work, without any backups, to force them to focus on the logo, and send a strong signal that I don't care about the redesign, and won't be paying that work.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#713

Post by notahacker »

javier2 wrote: post #563
notahacker wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tbf the agency's original "how long is a piece of string" response to website is probably fair here Some companies really do want to a/b test their shopping cart to death, and have 40 iterations of their logo with roundtable meetings in between, and that stuff can genuinely take many man months and in the case of the a/b testing might even be time and money well spent. I'm sure some of the agency's regular clients sp…

Yeah, its not great, but I dont think its unreasonable. Id expect it more in 25-30k range, 7k sounds like fairy tale. Lets say you have two designers working 40 hours on this over 3 months, thats quickly 20k just there, before any implementation. Dont joke about untangling Bootstrap from your css architecture, I’ve seen that take 6 months to get out from.

$7k doesn't sound like a fairytale, it sounds like a pretty standard ballpark for a logo and custom hero graphic, a discussion about order of homepage sections, and a cart flow with a radio button to select a product from. Easy to spend more time revising it, but that's a situation where the client should feel they're the one spending that budget. The fairytale is doing it with a $46 template and a $7 logo, but even those can have happy endings when the sought-after design is uncomplicated...

And whilst I'm sure there are complex apps and huge sites which are horrendously sensitive to untangling Bootstrap especially where pixel perfect preservation is required, we're talking about implementing three brand new pages of standard layouts plus a handful more black-on-white text pages with existing standard layouts and the new header, font and button carried over. Implementing that in 38 hours is not fast work.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#714

Post by bjohnson225 »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #609

Serif -> Cliche San Serif, CHECK! Quirky Original Graphics -> Corporate Memphis, CHECK! Distinctive Colours -> Generic Shades of #0000FF, CHECK! Crisp Headline -> Something Generic, CHECK! Sharp image of distinctive looking device, makes you curious, looks like a unit! -> Generic Graphics, CHECK! And more... They ruined it! What a shame it was so good, so perfect before. The redeeming thing about the new design, if a…

Surely the redeeming thing about the new design is that it led to 40% higher sales?

By the only metric that matters this design is significantly better than “perfect”.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#715

Post by chiefalchemist »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #509
ratww wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I still like Agile and Scrum, as much as other devs might hate it. “Yeah I want REAL deliverables after the first or second week”. Keeps me honest. And will keep me from working with architecture astronauts don’t really deliver anything but hot air and build ultra-extensible structures that are actually impossible to extend beyond the fantasy world of their maker. Or the equivalent for designers.

I'd bet you a large sum of money this agency used Agile. Agile is not a guarantee of deliverables you care about. There is a lot of useless stuff you can deliver.

> I'd bet you a large sum of money this agency used Agile.

Probably not. Larger relatively successful design / marketing agencies are - based on my experience - poorly run, poorly managed, and poorly led. This gets exasperated by high turn-over (read: good people leave, dead weight stays behind).

Training, etc.? Not a priority. Revenue, it's all about revenue. They're "creatives", not business problem-solver types and presume mess and excessive friction are unavoidable.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#716

Post by ratww »

doctor_eval wrote: post #560
ratww wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I still like Agile and Scrum, as much as other devs might hate it. “Yeah I want REAL deliverables after the first or second week”. Keeps me honest. And will keep me from working with architecture astronauts don’t really deliver anything but hot air and build ultra-extensible structures that are actually impossible to extend beyond the fantasy world of their maker. Or the equivalent for designers.

Agile and scrum are in practice such nebulous terms that while I don’t doubt that you have had good experience with the particular version of these concepts that you yourself use, the agency could well consider itself to be using the same concepts - yet here we are. The older I get, the more I come to understand that the problem with projects is people, not methodology. 30% of IT projects still fail, despite “agile”…

I agree that there's a lot of wiggle room, but there's still some ground rules, like being iterative, not having to plan for everything beforehand, deliver smaller things little by little, not being a perfectionist and turning the review process into a living hell.

But you are 100% right about the problem being people. The problems I see with agile are always because people try to find escape hatches in the process. Designers want to prepare every single detail before developers start working and hate iterating because fear of the "original vision" being a mistake, product owners don't want partial stuff in the beta channel so everything has to be in its final state, product owners don't know or don't want to reduce scope so developers end up with impossible sprints, developers want a perfect definition finished before starting work, so zero chance to iterate...

I also agree with people throwing out individual/interactions and picking a heavy-handed process instead :(

Re: I regret my website redesign

#717

Post by jack_riminton »

debacle wrote: post #61

I live through this every 2 years: - Marketing team decides they want a new site. - I tell them when/how we can schedule it. - They decide they want to go outside so it can get done "quicker" by "professionals." - It costs 5-10x what it would in house, the product is harder to work with, using some WordPress plugins no one has ever heard of, it's not responsive on mobile nor usable on our demographic's primary resolu…

Wow this one is spot on. Had exactly the same experience as a contract PM working with Marketeers who lived in fairy-land.

Two hilarious moments: 1. A big fuss was made of a launch of a new site, marketeers demanded that we had plenty of extra servers for the demand. On launch day I had the live stats of visitors and it occasionally flickered to above 0. 2. We finally needed to refactor and do some maintenance to the duct-taped code that had resulted in years of 'everything is urgent' 'one extra feature by tomorrow`. When I told the Head of Marketing they were doing this vital work, she couldn't understand that because no new graphics or UI were being produced that they were doing actual work - "But I can't see any new work"

It was not worth the small fortune in daily rates they were paying me

Re: I regret my website redesign

#718

Post by ratww »

danjac wrote: post #651
ratww wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I still like Agile and Scrum, as much as other devs might hate it. “Yeah I want REAL deliverables after the first or second week”. Keeps me honest. And will keep me from working with architecture astronauts don’t really deliver anything but hot air and build ultra-extensible structures that are actually impossible to extend beyond the fantasy world of their maker. Or the equivalent for designers.

Scrum is really for low-trust environments where management fundamentally don't trust the developers to deliver - whether because the developers aren't experienced, not very good at self-management, or too easily distracted by shiny things, or because you're an archetypal MBA type who distrusts any underling who might be smarter than you. If you trust your developers (whether in-house or contractors) to do the job yo…

That's not entirely wrong, but Scrum is also great for high-trust environments where you want to have deliverables from sprint one.

And it is actually more useful when things are flipped, and the team doesn't really trust the client/customer/manager. Which is often what happens more frequently.

But you're totally right that Scrum can get kinda heavy on the meetings side. Which tends to be the rule, not the exception. The only times I had this exception it was when we had a technical person working on the requirements, though. No designer or product owner making nebulous Jira tickets.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#719

Post by 734129837261 »

I've worked at an agency like that for a loooong time in my past. It's shocking that a website that looks like a cookie-cutter template that you could buy for $50 on websites like WrapBootstrap could cost a THOUSAND times as much.

It is absolutely ridiculous. This guy was ripped off by a combination of wilful malice and sheer incompetence.

Anyone would be better helped by going onto a website like Fiverr with your pre-selected paid-for Bootstrap template and tasking a designer from India or Pakistan whose work you like with the simple one-price task: "Take this template and personalize it to my product."

The total costs shouldn't amount to more than $1000 to $2000, including taxes. And, honestly, you'd have a far better-looking result than... this thing. It looks like it was designed by amateurs, really.

I could set that entire page up in less than 3 hours. Easily. Responsive and all.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#720

Post by ratww »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #509
ratww wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I still like Agile and Scrum, as much as other devs might hate it. “Yeah I want REAL deliverables after the first or second week”. Keeps me honest. And will keep me from working with architecture astronauts don’t really deliver anything but hot air and build ultra-extensible structures that are actually impossible to extend beyond the fantasy world of their maker. Or the equivalent for designers.

I'd bet you a large sum of money this agency used Agile. Agile is not a guarantee of deliverables you care about. There is a lot of useless stuff you can deliver.

Even if they're using agile, it's up to the customer to ask for deliverables that they care about if they want them.

Of course it would be much better if the agency were honest, but if for seven months the deliverables were only "promises", then it's definitely not agile...

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