The newsletter from Cooper, runs an article on how to avoid too many iterations and when designing an application or website: Early and often: How to avoid the design revision death spiral
Basically it comes down to communication and communication only. Because if you don’t talk to the client (be it an in-house department or an external client) they will believe anything they had in their mind in the first place. And you wont know what they really need or want.
You’ll end up with an endless list of revisions, unfocused and unspecific feedback and losts of preconceptions from the client that can start the beginning of feature creep.
David Cronin gives some basic advise on how to avoid all this.
- Manage your communications
(Assign somebody to talk to the client, somebody who is good at this. The problem is many of us are on their own so switch the had, make the click in your head.) - Get the right people in the room
- Planning and scheduling
- Collaborate early and often
- Structure meetings around specific decisions
- Involve key stakeholders early through interviews
- Use personas and scenarios to provide context
( Use my persona fill out form to start writing personas ) - Define and agree upon the problem before defining solutions
(I wrote about this before: define goals before even thinking about a solution.) - Develop visual renderings in progressive detail
- Be willing to throw things out