Another design tale of "don't f*ck us about" has come back to me:
New section for a banking website was requested, think it was Savings, which for some reason had been left off the scope for the fancy pants agency rather than the mere in-house design/dev team which I was part of at the time.
So I got my crayons out, it was signed off, my good pal Dan built it, we tested it together and were really proud of it because, frankly, it was better than the agency effort.
Presented it a week before go live to a muted response from the Marketing team, cue:
"That's lovely guys, but why doesn't it look like Mortgages and Insurance?"
"This is the design you signed off..."
"But it's different from the agency built sections."
At this point Dan left the room, having had to built a pretty complex stylesheet to accommodate all the fancy stuff we'd promised.
"Uh huh, but you didn't say 'Just make it look like the agency sections' at any point. This has been a month long project for us and you've signed off all the iterations along the way..."
"Sorry. Can you just make what we want happen?"
At this point Lee, the planning manager, steps in because he can see I'm about to kill someone.
"Sure, but it's a new change so the scope will probably be around 8 weeks."
"That's great! Thanks for the quick turnaround."
It would have taken a day to make the required changes.
