A Moment of Pride

I wanted to share a moment of pride from last week.

I have been working with a customer for about 6 months. They are a fintech company and they offer debt consolidation services. Naturally due to the space they are operating in, they have challenges in acquiring customers who are willing to work with them and then having additional difficulty in retaining them as they pay off their consolidated debt. They wanted to revamp certain flows on their website, so we started.

I had a feeling about how good this was going to be after our first meeting. First of all, they were on time! When you do agency/consulting work, it is very common to be used as an ego satisfaction artifact; this client wasn't doing that.

Second: only two product people and one technical person joined the meeting. They didn't bring the entire company, and the entire company didn't actually want to join - they left it to this small internal team. Many times, because of the pumped-up sexiness of "design", everyone who has an email in the company want to join design meetings. Especially when it is a kick-off, because they need to be involved. Not the case in this company. Only the parties that have immediate impact to the work and the parties that will be impacted by the work have joined.

Third: They brought in their own high-ish fidelity wireframes. For ego-driven design teams, this is where the snickering laughs start. "Hehehe who are them to make designs, hehehe" says the inflated senior product designer who doesn't have a single idea about the domain they are about to work in, and takes pride at copying the same corner radius, the same thoughtless color stepping (10 shades each for 5-6 colors), and the same typeface dynamics as everyone else on Dribbble and now LinkedIn.

We didn't do that. We asked them to walk us through these designs and learned quite a bit about why they wanted the screens to look that way.