"And another thing...the current site is in German": the final project in an international digital business consultancy

ABSTRACT

Between 1996 and 2001, large international Internet consulting firms built many Web sites and applications. These firms combined the disciplines of business strategy, technology and design into one service offering, capable of creating businesses and launching business initiatives using the Internet.This paper portrays a project completed by one of these companies, Viant Corporation, in 2001, at a time when they were starting to suffer from a severe economic downturn. It portrays the projectís design process in detail, and how it was affected both by Viantís culture and business model, and the projectís economic context.A team of mostly non-designer consultants adopted new roles, design processes, tools, and work environments to fulfill the role of interaction designers. The case serves both as a vivid example of adapting design processes and standards to adverse circumstances, and as a historical snapshot of a business context that may never reappear.

REFERENCES

• 1: Richard I. Anderson , Jennifer Crakow , Jay Joichi, Improving the design of business and interactive system concepts in a digital business consultancy, Proceedings of the conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques, June 25-28, 2002, London, England [doi>10.1145/778712.778743]
• 2: John Armitage, Industry briefs: Viant, interactions, v.8 n.2, p.75-79, March 2001 [doi>10.1145/361897.361926]
• 3: Alan Cooper , Paul Saffo, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., Indianapolis, IN, 1999
• 4: Eppinger, S. D., Ulrich, K. T. Product Design and Development. Boston, MA: Irwin Mcgraw Hill, 2000. 26--29.
• 5: Maister, D. H. Managing the Professional Services Firm. New York, NY: The Free Press, 1993.
• 6: Peterson, Dr. J. Personal communication.
• 7: Alta Vista Babelfish: http://babelfish.altavista.com/

INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
concept design, design planning, ethnography/ethnographic studies, experience design, experience strategy, information architecture, interaction design, multidisciplinary design/interdisciplinary design, organizational culture, organizational planning, participatory design, process improvement, service design, system design, user experience, user interface design, user research, user-centered design/human-centered design