A horror story of web design gone wrong

For context, I want to share my worst real experience of web design gone wrong. Obviously I won’t name names. I’ll just say that the website received significant traffic, including a high volume on mobile. And that the business was dependent on sales from their website. So it was a big deal to get this right!

A company had spent 3+ months and well over a $100,000 on a massive re-design of their website. They had created some beautiful concept work, but they were nowhere close to a build-ready design, and a hard-launch-date was growing painfully close.

The team hadn’t so much as thought about it how it would work beyond desktop. And when I quizzed the team responsible about how any of it would work at other sizes, I just got blank expressions back, like I was asking crazy questions! They genuinely didn’t see it as part of their job to think about these things.

They had designed a pretty picture of a website, only. Not anything that could be built.

Now, I’m not suggesting a period of design concept exploration isn’t worthwhile, before getting into production ready design… But, they had exhausted almost the entire project timeline, and the build was now well-behind schedule (or rather, it hadn’t started).

When I opened their first PSD, I discovered the website container was roughly 1,750px wide. If you’re not gasping already, consider this width would only have worked for 1-5% of traffic!

After a little digging, the reasons for all this became clear:

For months, there had been a team of visual designers lovingly crafting pixels in isolation from anyone with any responsive or development knowledge.

Tellingly, they had been reviewing their work on large TV displays, and printing mockups onto small pieces of paper, pinned on a studio wall. Amazingly, nobody during this process had considered how it actually looks in a web browser, let alone on smaller screens and mobile devices.

In the end, they launched (something) on deadline. But, with only half the website built, a myriad of issues, and a lot of very unhappy stakeholders angrily asking: