A couple of interesting talks from recent Umbraco conferences (Codegarden 13 and UK Umbraco Festival), they are however not specific to Umbraco as a system.
Meet me at the browser
Liv Madsen - meet me at the browser. A great talk that touches on shifting expectations both internally and with clients about the process of design. Ultimately building content first and designing in the browser.
http://stream.umbraco.org/video/8317157/liv-madsen-meet-me-in-the-browser
SCRUM at cogworks
From last year’s UK Umbraco Festival, Adam Shallcross of cogworks talks about SCRUM and how they do agile. The key takeaway from this for me was - having grown up conversations with clients and being realistic about the processes with them.
Adam Shallcross - SCRUM at The Cogworks
Grown up conversations
Both talks point towards a trend of longer trying to blind people with shiny shiny web designs, and instead being realistic and “grown up” with clients.
Adam touched on it in the Q&A of his talk. If a client want shiny shiny, this causes more problems than it is worth. It is often better to turn down that work rather than engage in the process of pleasing people with pictures before anyone has even worked out why they want a website.
Getting back to the core of why the client needs something and what the expectations are is often difficult and it’s made harder by the expectation that the “design agency” is going to turn up with pretty pictures. Turning this expectation around is no easy task, but one that ensures much smoother projects if you succeed.