January 12, 2012

Delivery Methods

How does one send concepts, wireframes, and/or mockups to a client for review? Email? Post it in the PM system of choice? Print them out on a $40 inkjet and add a staple or two? While all the methods are common and accepted these days, none do a very good job of gathering very specific feedback, especially when face-to-face interaction is almost a luxury these days.

Email, while irreplaceable for the time being, essentially does the bare minimum in the back-forth of delivery/feedback. We've all experienced situations where a single email consisting of three mockups results in an insane email thread where even gmails impressive search tool won't help you extract relevant feedback a few days later. It's never pretty, but it does the job, right?

As a small part of our internal revitalization, we've been looking at the ideal method of delivery of our concepts, wireframes, and/or mockups. The first step of doing so is to identify what's problematic with the current method.

  • Explaining your designs. While it's understood that page designs should speak for themselves, everyone will run into situations where a certain element on a page needs to be explained in detail. Yes, I understand that this is almost a trivial concern, and can be detailed in the body of the email, but this experience can be greatly improved.
  • Fragmentation. One other slight against email is the ease in which an email thread can get derailed in no time. A single email can spawn four separate replies, all referencing one another and the original email in some way. This all results in lots of confusion and backtracking to answer a single question.
  • 100% Zoom. How often have you heard a client question the size of an element (Logo being the prime example)? What are the chances that the client is viewing these mockups at 80% scale? This is something that is often overlooked, and it can throw both sides of the discussion into scratch-head mode.

Now that we know what the problems are (keeping minor issues out of it), we can begin to search for a solution.

We have begun looking into a few options to improve the way we deliver to clients. While there seems to be no perfect way, two of the best services we've looked at are Notable and CAGE. Stay tuned for a followup post in which I put those two services through their paces.

I'd love to hear in comments below how you handle mockup/wireframe delivery, and if there are any services I should look into.