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Business

robberbaron
robberbaron
23,869 Points

Responsive Design Process / Dealing with customer

Hi,

my partner and me just founded a web design company. As we understand the importance of responsive design, we want to to bring that to our customers. Right now we are about the formulate the terms and conditions together with a lawyer.

He told us that he needs to know our design process in order to adapt the terms and conditions accordingly. but he started out with some terms and conditions that as we noticed somewhat apply for a design process that was used when people still designed for static pages.

Back then customers signed some contract, some product specification was established and signed, the designer started to design a mockup, the customer signed off the design and then thereafter the hole thing was coded. (or the like - have not been in business then but think it worked somewhat like that)

So we had distinct phases were the design could be signed off by the customer - giving him as well as the web design company some security.

For clarification: Back then: Mockup -> Feedback -> Iterate -> Produce (linear - easy to implement stages for signoffs) Now: Mockup <- -> Feedback <- -> Produce <- -> Mockup (not linear/ going back and forth hard to )

I wonder what might be the best way to go today.

Should we create a Moodboard instead of a mockup and let sign off that? Somehow this does seem a little weird to me...

How can you give the user some kind of security? Might we get rid of signing off phases because the iterations are that short (scrum-like)? Are there any best practices for terms and conditions for responsive design? Am I worrying in some wrong direction?

Ideas, comments and answers highly appreciated.

Kind regards Marc

4 Answers

Tom Bedford
Tom Bedford
15,645 Points

I would have a look at Andy Clarke's Killer Contract which I've used as a base my own contracts. This blog post gives some background info on the contract.

Related to responsive design:

"We create look-and-feel designs, and flexible layouts that adapt to the capabilities of many devices and screen sizes. We create designs iteratively and use predominantly HTML and CSS so we won’t waste time mocking up every template as a static visual. We may use static visuals to indicate a look-and-feel direction (colour, texture and typography.) We call that β€˜design atmosphere.’"

You may want to consider Style Tiles.

robberbaron
robberbaron
23,869 Points

Hi Tom,

thanks for the great recommendations! More than I expected :-) I guess we will be taking the Killer Contract, maze tweak it a tiny bit according to our needs! Really cool - thank you very much.

Kind regards Marc

robberbaron
robberbaron
23,869 Points

And of course Style Tiles are also great! I a l already heared about them in a talk from Laura Kalbag. But did not follow the link :-) Thanks also for this! Just great!

As far as following a more modern contract for your lawyer goes, you might have better luck searching around for an agile software development contract template of a scrum development contract template and tweaking it to match web designing. Those two are recent methods, based on doing many short iterations instead of the traditional, plan it and do it without changing the plan along the journey. That kind of template would probably be a better match. Good question and I'm going to do this down the road when I am ready to freelance solo.