Like many digital agencies, Netsight has long held the view that speculative design work is damaging to us, to the client, and to the industry as a whole. But not so long ago we were talked into producing a creative pitch, our first in several years, and the process turned out to be of questionable value for all involved. So I'm taking the opportunity to remind myself (and anyone else who might be reading) why speculative design work is just so counter-productive.
A piece of speculative design work is an uninformed sales pitch, not an informed response to real requirements.
The sole point of a speculative design pitch is to sell your services as a designer. Therefore, to be successful, that piece of design is most likely going to show the client what they want to see, not what they need to see. So begins the process of a designer second guessing what the client will want to see. No matter how good the brief is, the pitch design will be deliberately indulgent (with that ever-elusive "visual impact" applied in spades) and will not necessarily serve the client's users in anything other than a superficial way. In the normal design process, a good designer will ask difficult questions of the brief and make suggestions which may challenge convention. He or she will do this as part of an iterative, investigative process. But these things rarely go down well in a speculative pitch as there is a high probability that, to begin with, they will land wide of the mark - and the creative pitch is a one-shot deal. Often the worst outcome of the speculative design pitch is that the piece of pitch creative is actually used, straight off the bat, as the final production design - without ever going through that process of discovery, collaboration and refinement which is essential to great design. This is something that many clients don't consider.
Speculative design is wasteful and ends up costing everybody money.
If the worst outcome is that a design born out of a sales pitch is adopted as the final design, then the only alternative is that the speculative pitch concept is largely discarded and a "proper" IA and design process is then followed to arrive at the final design. Clearly then a significant portion of work done to produce the sales pitch design has just been wasted, which will inevitably be paid for out of the overall project budget. And of course, agencies which regularly engage in speculative design work have to pad out their project rates overall to pay for the time they lose in pitches for projects they don't win. This is bad for everyone.
I do understand why it is so tempting for a client to request creative pitches. Hold a beauty parade, and you'll get 5 or more completely different responses to a brief which you can consider and choose between without having to pay a penny. You might even be tempted to take your favourite bits and pieces from the different pitches and instruct the appointed agency to combine them into one (frequently horrific) chimera design...
So what is the alternative? Of course the obvious answer is to look at your potential agency's past work and case studies, and where appropriate talk to their previous clients to find out how well they fulfilled the brief.
But there is another option, and it's one that we're using very effectively with more and more clients. We call it the "Pre-production Phase", and it's simply a small package of requirements analysis, IA and design prototyping which stands alone from the main project. This approach is not uncommon but is often mistakenly thought of as a "paid pitch" - although to think of it as this is to miss the point. The pre-production phase aims to understand the client's values, their users, their competition, their business processes, their objectives and criteria for success - and to distil these down into a meaningful proposition which is independent of the technology that would be used in production (in our case, Plone). Both the process and the deliverables of the pre-production phase have intrinsic value to the client, and can be considered in isolation and in advance of the main bulk of the project.
The pre-production phase might typically cost something in the region of 10% of the total project budget, but this is in no way wasted investment. Virtually all of the work done in the pre-production phase would have been needed in the main build phase - it is simply being moved into its own stand-alone work package - and the clarity that the pre-production phase brings to the main project is invaluable, frequently leading to savings elsewhere. This then is surely the ideal solution: reduced risks and lower costs for all parties.
