Quality Control and You
There’s no time for introductions, class is in session.
How often do you review your work? How thorough of a review process do you do? What do you do for usability testing? How do you find bugs? How many different browsers, comps, systems, monitors, etc. do you use? Do you re-read your copy aloud, do you pass it off to someone else?
Nature Valley didn’t, and now they’re stuck with this:
On Mountain???
Not THE mountain, but on mountain.
When the woman in front of me at the grocery store spotted this on my box of granola bars, I fully gave them the benefit of the doubt.
“On mountain…is that what the kids say? That’s probably slang,” I suggested.
“There’s no way that’s slang. Who’s their copywriter?! This is atrocious,” she retorted.
She was right.
Read that sentence a few times, say it out loud – it’s absolutely stupid. It sounds like something an unfrozen caveman might say. The concern I have is that this General Mills company either couldn’t afford an English major (a sucker is born every minute) or staff an adequate marketing department. In reality, one half-wit employee (perhaps, say, yours truly) could see that this was wrong at first glance. It would have taken a manner of minutes to have fixed this before the boxes were printed up, and the company wouldn’t have looked like imbeciles.
What does this mean for you?
It’s not hard to get lost in a project, and when you’re on an even smaller team than General Mills, it’s very easy to cut corners. Unfortunately, often times this comes down to skipping quality control (QC, QA, drafts, what have you), not hiring a competent copywriter, or skipping the user experience during design (talking mainly about website design, but this is applicable to tangible products too). While it’s easy for us to believe that we can get by on a smaller team of highly motivated and extremely talented individuals, there’s no reason to cut this many corners.
Grab your neighbor, your mom, have the shop take shifts going through the project. Ask if it makes sense, listen to them ask questions – why are they asking questions, is something too confusing?
Even if your shop is small, or if you’re just one person, it’d be better to miss a deadline than to send something out “on mountain.”
i think you’re right, we get so close to a project that we miss the trees for the forest. we just want to get it done on time and getting it done right takes a back seat. it’s a short-sighted mistake that fails to consider the effect of hiring another designer instead of a good proofer.
in a side note, an old boss ran a shop where it was a fireable offense to send out a client-facing *email* that included a typo.
i was recently forwarded a tv commercial currently running for a client so i could post to youtube, blog, etc. then someone noticed a major misspelling in one of the main messages. it was pretty. :)
This post reminds me of this Hammer product I bought for a race–it said on the label that it was the “Ulitmate Race Day Advantage.”
This ad is a great example of the improtance of regualr QC througout a project and not waiting until the end.
I almost wonder if someone didn’t catch this mistake, but was forced to push it through due to a deadline. It seems to me that by adding the the word “the ” with a space would have pushed the first sentance over on to the guys shoulder (assuming they didn’t reduce the type size) In order to maintain the symetry with the Nature Valley logo they would have to push that to the left as well and that would have really mucked up the ad.
Not that Nature Valley should be excused because an ad can always be reworked, but if you catch your mistakes too late in the game sometimes your stuck producing shotty work.