When I’m reading through business requirement documents, creative briefs, or high level explanations about what a site should do there’s one line this is almost always there:
“We want the design to be flexible for the future.”
It’s by far my least favorite thing to see. My beef is not that I think sites shouldn’t be flexible for the future (they should!), it’s just that the expectations surrounding this one single line vary so greatly.
There’s no doubt that thinking about the future is vitally important to a business. But I’ve seen countless conversations (about navigation structures, page description diagrams, wireframes, and visual design) get derailed because “we need to think about what might happen in the future”. This should never, ever happen. We should base our discussions on what you know, for certain, today.
Similarly, brainstorming about the future should happen before we start doing design. Otherwise, we run into trouble and the design you end up with will be less effective.
When I read the flexibility line, I can’t help but think the client is trying to cut design costs because they don’t want to have to do a large redesign again in just a few years. This makes some sense (you should be able to add features and tweak the site). But if down the road you want big changes, you’ll need to have another designer take a look at each proposed addition on a case-by-case basis, to figure out how they’ll best work with the overall design.
The bottom line is this: Designing with an eye toward flexibility and the future can be done one of two ways. Either you build a house and leave out a few bricks and some roof tiles, or you build a complete, smaller, starter house that is perfect for your needs now (but which you can build upon later.) In the latter case, you’ve thought briefly about the future, but you’re focused on building the best house for today.
That’s the right way to build out flexibility for the future.
This article was originally posted to the Blue Flavor blog, so please direct your comments and discussion over there and we’ll talk.