Question: What happens when you have a committee of people making a key design decision. Half want the color red, half want blue. What ultimately gets decided?

Answer: I’m not sure what the ultimate decision will be, but it is likely that a majority won’t be happy with whatever gets decided.

As Web site development professionals, we often are approached with committees of people who are tasked to make a Web site. Committees often operate on consensus, which requires most of the people to agree with a decision. This is a great approach for deciding what company to hire to make your Web site, but it often is not a good approach for actually making the Web site.

Take the above example. If you choose red, half of the group will be unhappy. If you choose blue, half will be unhappy. Try and compromise with purple and no one is happy. You’ve also likely exhausted your Web site developer in deciding all of this. Here are some tips to help to avoid “Web sites designed by committee:”

• Take the decision out of the committee: The best approach is for the committee to empower one person to be the decision maker.  That person should be someone with good judgement who the committee can trust, but also someone who can stand up to individuals and help move the process along.
• Have a clear decision making process: Without clear rules, one person on your committee can derail the whole process. By agreeing to a procedure for making decisions at the beginning, it will help make sure that the process is kept on track.
• Start Phase 2 early: A Web site is something that grows with your organization. Committees often come up with new good ideas during the process.  It is best to stay on the original project track, but to start a list of ideas to include in the next iteration.

Crowdsourcing Web sites are all of the rage right now. Many people say they are a quick and easy way to get design work done at a minimal cost. Should companies use them for design work?

You would imagine that as at the owner of a Seattle-based Web site development firm, I wouldn’t suggest these cheaper options. You would be right, of course. However, I think it is important to know what these sites are good for:

• Quantity: These sites can produce a large amount of material for you to review.
• Speed: They produce this large amount of material in a small amount of time.
• Cost: They do all of the above on a very small budget.

A lot, Fast, and Cheap. What could go wrong? As I mentioned above, we’re biased against these sites as you might think that we compete against them. So rather than take my opinion, you could take Slate.com’s Rob Walker’s opinion. He commissioned a newsletter logo using Crowdspring.com. He paid $350 and got 32 submissions from 22 designers in one week. He consulted design experts and Slate’s own art department for feedback on what was sent. Here’s what he and his experts wrote:

“Nothing remarkable, nothing with charisma or stature or intellect or wit.”

Everything seemed “fine, and clean, and proper, without being right.”

I wouldn’t use CrowdSpring for a more serious design project—but I also wouldn’t have shelled out serious money for this one.

At one point, Walker mentions that a better design would have come from a more lengthy conversation between the client and the designer.  I couldn’t agree more – great design comes from the back-and-forth process between the designer or design firm and the client.