Embrace Constraints - They’re Your Best Friend.
You’re at the point in the discovery phase of a project when you learn your client has a limited budget and their site needs to be live in weeks. “Argh” you think to yourself - if they only had a longer deadline and more cash we could really do a knock out job and not sacrifice all the whiz-bang features.
Constraints are an unavoidable reality of every project. Instead of wishing your client had more resources, stop and embrace the project’s constraints. Having too little time and money makes you examine the goals of your project and helps you create simple and efficient ways to solve your client’s problems.
Possibilities are endless but constraints are knowns that force you to focus on core issues of the project while cutting out all of the extraneous background noise of the “bells and whistle” features that are usually non-essential to solving the problem.
We recently took on a project for the Illinois Institute of Technology who had an extremely tight deadline to get a site up to promote a new university-wide planning process aimed at reestablishing IIT as a major force in higher education. The site was intended to give background on the plan and solicit opinions from its faculty, staff and students. Here our major constraint was time. From project start to project completion we clocked in at just less than three weeks turn around, successfully getting a site up that would provide as a means to inform and gather feedback for IIIT. The site is simple and focused but most importantly it solves a problem for our client.
“Man built most nobly when limitations were at their greatest.”
— Frank Lloyd Wright
