Mark is patient and says little

I got into an argument with someone at work a while ago about a sign-on mechanism for a new product that's being developed. The design produced by the marketing department featured a large graphic which looked exactly like something that should be clicked on, but in fact did nothing. I tried to explain to assorted marketing people why that was a bad idea. I was overruled on the grounds of "but that's how Sky does it". That chafed a little, since, as I've mentioned before, I'm rather proud of my skills when it comes to user interface design, whereas marketing have time and time again demonstrated that they wouldn't know a decent user interface if it dressed up as an early English monarch and sang "I am a user interface I am" to the tune of Henry the 8th. Nevertheless, I resisted the temptation to reply "Well, if Sky jumped off a bridge would you follow?", since I suspect they very well might, and instead argued, quite reasonably I thought, that Sky is a well enough known brand that they succeed in spite of such foibles rather than because of them. Still it did no good.

Times passes, and the day comes when the new sign-on is presented to our MD. The first thing he does is to try to click on the thing that shouldn't be clicked on. The marketing department looks at Mark. Mark smiles and says nothing, yet loudly radiates unmistakable "I told you so" vibes.

I think in future I need to take a new approach with the marketing department - something along the lines of "please listen to me, I actually know what I'm talking about."