I work for an inbound marketing agency that is on a pretty rapid growth track. We're doing really well for ourselves. We have great project managers. We have a team of very talented designers and our devs (of whom I am one) are very skilled at what we do. For the last couple of years we've been pushing the envelope in terms of UI design and most of the sites that we build for clients are extremely modern for lack of a better term. The CEO, advised by our company's art director, has given the design team a "sky's the limit" directive when they design and they come up with some really crazy ideas for our UIs. As a web dev, these can either be a lot of fun to work on or they can be a real pain in the butt. Lately, things have been getting out of hand as we launched the single most over-designed, over-engineered restaurant website that I have ever seen and while the client loved the designs, in practice, the site is loaded with usability problems and the design doesn't lend itself to what should be a fairly straightforward user experience. What's worse, I'm seeing more and more of these wild UI designs with no sign of any restraint being ordered.
As a senior-level dev with 15 years experience, I've voiced my concern about the UIs that we've been building, but the criticism falls on deaf ears. The design staff, as talented and visionary as they are, are also very young, between 25 and 30 years old with this agency being their first experience in an agency environment and with not much in the way of UI design experience. I'm now seeing a very real need for a UX/UI professional who will put the brakes on these crazy designs and help us produce the cutting-edge sites that we want to build, without compromising usability. I need to engage the CEO on this but he has an exceptionally high opinion of the art director who guides the design process and trusts him implicitly.
I'm still kind of considered the new guy around here and so I don't carry a whole lot of personal currency with the management but we're at a point where this can't be ignored any longer. Eventually, we're going to shoot ourselves in the foot with one of these pie-in-the-sky builds. Can someone please help me find a way to explain the need for a UX professional without sounding like I'm insulting our own product or stepping on anyone's toes higher up in the hierarchy than myself?