I had a webinar yesterday on how to successfully execute interface designs when you really have no time to design in. All of the pitfalls the presenter talked about sounded so damn familiar; arguing over little design points that may or may not be useful, spinning your wheels over a section of functionality instead of the whole shabang, grabbing hold of a design bone and not letting go of it no matter how much your teammates plead with you, ad infinitum.

The fast summary of the presentation was toss out most of your process and modify what's left to fit the situation. To hear someone actually say "modify your process" was damn refreshing! Afterwards, I had gleeful thoughts of taking someone from my old job, sitting him down Clockwork Orange style, gagging him, and forcing him to sit through the presentation.

Just to hear someone say that for tight turn around jobs, toss the personas, damn, that was just... well, inwardly, I was waiting for someone to start giving a rambling speech on why that would doom the whole project to utter failure, and no one did! I'm left feeling like I want to research all of the other processes applied to interface design, just for more comparison points to the one process i kept getting hit over the head with, no matter what the project situation was.

Just before I left my old position, I told one of the project managers that I thought the company was really in danger of promoting their specific brand of dogma over concentrating on what approach was best for each specific client situation, i.e., the message was more important that the project, or the client's needs. He didn't think the company was there yet. I did, and I know of a least one other designer who felt the same way.

It's too easy, in the consulting world, to try to get as much money out of your client as you can. This seems to lead to, in my experience, user interfaces that look and work extremely well on paper, but that the client can't afford to build. I'd rather know my limitations up front, and design the best interface I can given a specific set of limitations. I'd rather involve developers from the beginning and know how long certain functionality takes to program. I want to design interfaces that will be built, not stuck in a project folder never to see the light of day.

I feel like there is more than one path in interface design that will get you to your goal, and until now, all but a small handful have been hidden from me.