Cyberonics
The client came to CommonVision with vague goals and low expectations.
They just wanted to make a simple application to display data about
the success rate of their product (a medical "pace maker"
designed help patients stop epileptic seizures). The CEO had a very
strong opinion about what he liked, but seemed unable to convey it
to his staff. Everyone kept saying that the CEO wanted something minimalist
and very "application looking." The developers and I worked
with Cyberonics for a few frustrating weeks trying to nail this project.
We would create an application, turn it over to the developers for
review, and they would present it to the CEO who rejected it.
After the third failure I insisted that his staff provide us with
a sample of something he did like. They were very resistant, but
I forced the issue and actually went a little over their heads by
going through their head of marketing. Normally I wouldn't do this,
but we had burned too much time and money on this project and it
was becoming obvious that, somewhere in the Cyberonics hierarchy,
there was a breakdown in communication between what the CEO wanted
and what his staff thought he wanted.
The marketing head came back with a list of Web sites, one of which
included the Mercedes-Benz Website. Although all of the Web sites
were very sleek and classy, none of them were what I would call
“minimalist” or “application looking.” With
new design aesthetics in hand, I went for broke and created a Web-based,
rich-media demo full of pictures, DHTML effects, and video.
My Proof Of Concept (POC) absolutely knocked his socks off! He
said this was exactly what he was looking for and he immediately
green lighted the project and the budget increased dramatically
(mostly to include new features, more data, and better reporting
tools: I believe he increased the project budget from
$12,000 to more than $45,000). The product was released
on CD-ROM and was an unqualified success.
I’m very proud of this project, not only for its technical
accomplishments (I pulled off a lot of cool effects using only DHTML),
but because of the way I was able to lead my team in the right direction
after a very rocky start.
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