Solid State UX

Minutemen's Brilliant "Double Nickels on the Dime" Was Made For $1200

Sure, anyone can put a website up for free these days, so who even needs to spend five grand anymore, right?  In fact, I put this Wordpress site up in under two hours for a cost of $0 (I even piggybacked the hosting charges on another site I have.)  Then there is the other end of the spectrum – agency designed sites still cost $250,000+ to design and implement. Companies are still piling hundreds of thousands into internal development of their web presence with homegrown content systems and loads of internal developers.  When is this all going to converge?

As an information architect and user researcher I’m part of this machine – part of the development overhead.   But I’m feeling the pull every day to work smaller, faster, and cheaper.   How do we contain the scope of our projects while simultaneously striving for excellence in design?  Perhaps a clue lies in this recent post by graphic designer Lea Alcantara about redesigning her own portfolio site, a project which came in somewhere between $0 and $5,000.   Here’s the basic workflow she describes:

• Design with purpose
• Limit design feedback and put boundries around the way the feedback is considered
• Push the design into a few technologically intensive areas, then become expert in those technologies
• Kick start the finishing process by hiring a professional programmer, but only for a few key pages
• Finish it yourself using a robust, easy-to-use web platform (which in her case is Expression Engine but could just as easily be Drupal or Wordpress).

Ok. So she’s a professional web designer putting up her own website.  Most do, probably… and with decent results.   But within this workflow lies what I think the most important trend is in our industry.   Before long a lot of us will be planning the user experience from a pattern library of interaction design possibilities, getting a few designs in PSD form back from a designer somewhere, getting those designs sliced up by a good HTML/CSS person who is likely somewhere else, and bolting it all into a modified Drupal or Wordpress theme with a few custom plug-ins.   Real websites… designed by pros, relatively customized for the purpose – for $5,000.   Of course, innovation will continue and many projects will be done that cost more than this but we all can benefit from challenging our thinking and finding cheaper ways of working.

So I’m looking to talk to people who have created really great results by containing costs.  I’m especially interested to hear from people who have done this who are not highly skilled technical people or talented designers… people who needed to seek out help, but found ways to do this affordably.  After all, my favorite band – Minutemen – recorded my favorite record of all time – the classic double-alblum Double Nickels on the Dime - in 40 hours of studio time for under $1,200.   Sometimes huge constraints lead to great results.