This is what corporations are for

About this time last year, I was contracted to do a redesign of a web product for a corporate client. The product is over ten years old — it was originally a CD-ROM — and had only received minor touch-ups and tweaks over the years; meanwhile the amount content within the product had obviously grown enormously. The end result was a very dated-looking design (lots of frames, optimized for a 640x480 screen, 8-bit color, that sort of thing) whose interface was totally inadequate to the job. (The navigation was poorly thought out to begin with, IMHO, but far more so when applied to ten times the content it was originally designed for.) It’s also been maintained by hand-editing every one of thousands of pages all this time, so there are quite a few inconsistencies in the layout and structure.

So I worked with them for about three months, going back and forth with the (obviously inexperienced but very talented) project manager on the UI, restructuring the navigation, updating the look-and-feel, and reassuring them that I could write a quick script that would generate all the pages in a tiny fraction of the time it’d take to code it all by hand. Built them three different design mockups, each with substantially different navigation methods; had lots of meetings with the various interested parties, all seemed to be going great, and they suddenly pulled the plug. We’re going to bring the design in-house, they said. We’d still like you to do that script thing, though, so we’ll contact you when we’ve finished our new design.

That’s cool. This sort of thing happens all the time, actually; usually a result of some power-play over which department has control of the product. (In this case that was confirmed; they wanted to “unify the design across the product line”, which means the owner of some other part of the product line won.) Means they just threw a whole bucket of money down the drain, but since I was the particular drain in question, I wasn’t too bothered by that.

Fast forward until now. I finally got a copy of the new design from the (new) product manager. Which they’ve been working on for nine months. I know it wasn’t just stalled, because I was in periodic contact with them all along. They’ve been actively working on it all this time. So: nine months of collaboration between managers and designers in two different departments; I don’t even want to think about the number of man-hours involved there.

End result: it looks virtually identical to the old design. They changed the logo — which is now even more lowest-common-denominator than before — and a couple of background images.

But at the same time, it’s clear they didn’t just throw my work out and start from scratch. The placement of the two or three UI elements that actually did change matches one of my layouts pretty closely: it’s clear that what happened is that they started with the new design, then gradually backed away from it in baby steps until they got back into their comfort zone.

What I’ve come to realize over the years is that this is what corporations are for. The corporate structure, this basically feudal system of competing departments each with its own territory and population and budget, exists for one and only one purpose: to put the brake on bad ideas. That it also tends to put the brake on good ideas is just an unfortunate side effect.

This is a good thing, most of the time. There’s another story from years ago that I can’t really tell you, but it boils down to: mid-level manager has a brilliantly stupid idea, runs amok briefly, then at the next budget review it’s quietly killed. (The project, not the manager.) The system worked. Small startups can afford to have bad ideas: they just go out of business. Problem solved. Giant corporations have more at stake; they have to default to a stance of, basically, fearing change. All that interdepartmental bickering serves as a first-level filter that’ll wipe out all but the least controversial ideas before they hit the public. This is why corporations survive so long — most new ideas will fail, so it’s better to stick to the old ones as long as possible. It’s also why their products tend to look like vanilla pudding.

This is why nobody has an in-house advertising department. Ads need to be risky, creative, and new to work well, and corporations are designed to be the opposite of that. So you have to outsource that stuff to a creative agency who can afford to take those risks. Let them get the idea to a certain point, then bring it back into the fold and let the corporate system grind off the sharp edges.

It’s also why skunkworks work so well: spin off a small independent group, let them run amok for a while; if they come up with something good, water it down and use it. Otherwise throw it away, no harm done. Or just buy startups; same thing, except you don’t need to fund them while they start up.

Possibly it’s how music and filmmaking work, too. I’ve no direct experience there so am mostly talking out of my ass now, but the gradual shift from the studio system to studio-funded “indie” filmmaking looks to me a lot like the big corporation spinning off skunkworks and profiting from the results.

And, finally — and this is the important bit — it’s why people like me get hired. There are tons of solo designers out there, and it’s taken me until now to figure out why. Corporations literally can’t escape their own event horizon; they need somebody from outside to launch things off in a new direction. Then they suck it back towards them until it’s in a relatively safe and comfortable orbit. Not that I’m mangling the metaphor or anything. But I finally figured it out; that’s the system, and the system works. It’s lumbering and slow and absurdly expensive, but it works.

Man, I sure wish they’d let me fix that new logo, though. Fugly.