Let’s talk about what happens while building a new website. As a web-designer you work hard on collecting requirements from the client, put all your creative juices to work and come up with a great design, run around to get the designs approved, and TA-DA! You have a mind-blowing design ready that your client too has given a go-ahead for. Now the time has come to pass this visual wonder off to your counterparts in the development team to create magic with this design.
But all that you can say after what you receive back as the end product is “What the ****????”
If you are a designer, you definitely have come across a similar situation at-least once in your career, where you fail to understand how could something designed so well go this wrong.
Though design and development seem like two faces of the same coin, where the two functions are expected to collaborate seamlessly creating great end-products, the functions most often struggle to work well together.
Here, let's take a deeper look at the three key aspects of post development website reviews:
Communication
The biggest challenge is the lack of communication. Most of the times we assume that the person on the other end knows exactly what we are talking about even without checking for his understanding.
Likewise, most of the times, when the design is being shared with the developers, the designers don’t follow proper guidelines assuming that the developers understand the underlying details. This not only leads to a lot of back and forth between the designers, clients and the developers, but also has a direct impact on the website launch timeline. The situation becomes although more complicated when the designers and developers are working remotely or across different time zones.
Collaboration
Getting stakeholders to review the website to check the user experience and evaluate whether the creative vision aligns with the company vision is only one part of the challenge. Designers lose a lot of time and energy in antics of collaboration over web design projects.
Most of the times, the only way stakeholders collaborate is by taking a plethora screenshots of website, pasting them in word file and sharing their feedback. This feedback is further passed on to the developers. On making the necessary changes, the developers again create a word document with another ocean of screenshots. This process is not only time consuming, but can be extremely frustrating.
Technology
Using inappropriate technology like emails, spreadsheets or word documents can only make collaboration more complicated. Instead of making it easy for stakeholders to share information, it only leads more towards miscommunication and disconnecting people further.
Imagine digging through long email threads where each one of the stakeholder has shared his feedback by hitting ’reply all’. Or even worst, imagine you are trying to find a feedback from a stakeholder who has conveniently forgotten to loop you in the mail thread as he missed hitting the ‘reply all’ button.
Inappropriate technology only leads towards building silos and leads further towards miscommunication.
Conclusion
It’s high-time that we think of better ways to manage post development reviews, collaborate seamlessly with stakeholders and make the process of creating phenomenal websites a breeze.
Say goodbye to your age old methods and start using modern solutions like website feedback tool. Ruttl is here to disrupt the post-development design review process and forever change the way you communicate, collaborate and share feedback with stakeholders.
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