What We Got Wrong This Year

Studio blogs are usually a highlight reel. This one is not. These are the four things that cost us the most this year, written down mostly so we stop repeating them.

We designed before we understood the content

On two projects we built beautiful layouts around placeholder copy and then spent weeks bending them around the real thing. Real content is not a later stage. When it is not ready, the honest move is to write a rough version ourselves and design against that, not against ideal-length paragraphs that will never exist.

We let one stakeholder stay invisible

A senior person who had not attended a single review appeared at the final presentation with fundamental objections. They were not unreasonable objections. They were just five weeks late. Now we ask who else needs to approve this before we start, and we get them into an early session even if it is inconvenient.

We underestimated handover

We shipped a system that was correct and almost unusable by the team who inherited it, because the documentation assumed our vocabulary. Handover is a design problem with its own audience and its own testing. We now build it with the client's team, in their language, before launch rather than after.

We took on a project we knew was wrong

The signs were all there in the first call. We took it because the timing suited us. It consumed more attention than the two good projects running alongside it, and none of the three ended up as strong as they should have been. That one was entirely on us.

What we changed

Content-first prototypes, a mandatory stakeholder map before kickoff, handover scheduled as a phase rather than a document, and a written check on every enquiry. None of it is clever. All of it came from getting something wrong first, which is generally how process gets built.