Some things have changed in the last year or so - the introduction of truly commoditised IT like Ning, Blog platforms, Drupal and a market full of ideas but short on cash - and the professionals in charge of designing products, services, PR and marketing must change accordingly. Ideas are extremely fragile and for those of us who have spent several years working with early stage entrepreneurs and venture capitalists we are painfully aware of just how fragile ideas really are. The best idea with the best team can still easily fail. Bad news indeed for the entrepreneur but even worse news for the mature company where cultures rarely encourage failures.

There is comfort, it would seem, in following the same processes from start to finish of a project. Let’s spend a week on moodboards, another on personas…throw in some use cases and time practically flies past. We have spent 10 years in that world and know it all too well. We’ve seen great ideas take years in development to stumble and fall at the finish line as the proposition proved to lose touch with it’s intended audience or the market have changed leaving years of development redundant.

Now, we know that experienced designers and user experience architects have the capacity to completely bypass the long processes and through instinct design a proposition that is good enough within just a few days.

A conclusion then; ideas are fragile but plentiful, companies are short on cash and wary of taking any risks, technology is cheaper than ever before and experienced people will create a good enough proposition within a few days, ready to test in the real world.

We believe that our responsibility as a creative agency is to be innovative in technology, route to market and in how we design digital user experiences. The project shown on this page will remain unnamed for confidentiality reasons but came to us with a 6 month launch plan. We created a complete vision, user experience and brand based on using Ning as platform - this took us 5 days and the first version of the site could be launched within weeks.

And hey, we may not get it right the first time but with the platform in place we can rapidly iterate and change based on real consumer feedback as opposed to spending 6 months building something we wont know will work until it goes live.