Wednesday 12 September 2007

Change all the design again?

Joey said in his post - "I suddenly took a look at the new web design they've done for us, which I've been approving every step of the way, and didn't like it any more, so I told them we had to start over."

I shared this post with a great designer and she said "Unless everyone sees the same picture. It is hard to even imagine the tiniest bit of enthusiasm everyone is able to squeeze when the whole thing has to be changed."

Very true.

I replied that is the role of a leader, that is to let the whole team know and agree on the direction together. Hardly anyone can do that, especially if it involves changing the whole thing of something people put weeks of efforts into. It is always between too much or too little, too complex or too simple. And the key is BALANCE.

I particularly like the 'sesame seeds' story in the post :

In one of Gerald Weinberg's books, probably The Secrets of Consulting, there's the apocryphal story of the giant multinational hamburger chain where some bright MBA figured out that eliminating just three sesame seeds from a sesame-seed bun would be completely unnoticeable by anyone yet would save the company $126,000 per year. So they do it, and time passes, and another bushy-tailed MBA comes along, and does another study, and concludes that removing another five sesame seeds wouldn't hurt either, and would save even more money, and so on and so forth, every year or two, the new management trainee looking for ways to save money proposes removing a sesame seed or two, until eventually, they're shipping hamburger buns with exactly three sesame seeds artfully arranged in a triangle, and nobody buys their hamburgers any more.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

eeeee... u quoted me!!! ^happy^

and just saw it...'great designer'? hehe, not...yet lah :P

Unknown said...

Autumnmusic,

You will be a great designer.

Of course, you need to find your own path to it. Hope next time we have chance to work together again.

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