As an entrepreneur who has been on the client’s side
of the design and development process, I’d like to discuss the thought
process of the client, as well as some
effective ways to interact with them. For example, why do they ask for Shakira music on the home page? And how do you respond to that?
I was recently referred to Sam Barnes’ piece on Smashing Magazine “
How to Explain to Clients That They Are Wrong (http://smashingmagazine.com/2009/12/10/how-to-explain-to-clients-that-they-are-wrong/).”
The article was well written and made a lot of sense to me, but there
are two sides to every story, and I’d like to add value to the argument
by responding from the client’s point of view.
For the most part, Sam did a great job of discussing how to evaluate
and act on poor decisions made by clients. What he missed, however, was
the impact that the nature of the relationship between clients and
creatives has on how decisions are made by both sides. By “creatives,” I
mean anyone involved in the design or development of a website or
application. Understanding this relationship will enable you, and your
clients, to make better decisions about the product.
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What’s On the Line For Us
Before getting into the decisions that entrepreneurs make, let’s look
at some of the factors that motivate these decisions. Setting the scene
will shine a light on the thought process of entrepreneurs and give you
a better idea of how to deal with them.
You’ll notice I use the terms “entrepreneur” and “client”
interchangeably. Even if your client works within the confines of a
corporation, as opposed to at the top of a new venture, it would not be
unusual for them to act in an entrepreneurial capacity. And even if they
aren’t entrepreneurs, but middle men who were assigned the project,
chances are they will still behave accordingly.
How do you deal with clients who often come up with weird, irrational requests? Image source (http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamcnelson/2090704218/)
First, let’s think about the person you’re working with. They believe
in an idea. They believe in it so much that they’ve left a paying job
for it. They’ve worked nights and weekends for it, alienated their
spouse, friends and family for it. They’ve begged, borrowed and stolen
for the opportunity to pursue it. They’ve put everything on the line for
their idea, their vision. And you know what the most important part of their vision is?
You.
It’s not them. And to be honest, it never really was. The first
question investors ask after hearing someone’s idea is, “OK, who’s
building it?” Your client knows that their creative team is the
only thing that can make their idea a reality.
You’re the most important piece of their puzzle, and, despite what
they tell themselves, what they know about you before starting the
project is often limited.
So, how did they find you?
Clients turn over every stone in search of a designer or developer,
because, by that time, the necessity of a good creative team has settled
in. Entrepreneurs might look harder than others because of the pressure
of their particular situation, but the importance of a good creative
team is lost on no one. And this isn’t like finding a lawyer, a doctor
or even a girlfriend.
It’s way harder.
The Leap of Faith
There are three gigantic problems with the process of finding a
creative team. First, the client has probably never done this before.
Secondly, finding a creative team is tough. Products such as Elegant.ly
will help, but because
clients generally don’t speak your language,
assessing the strengths of a firm and how it would mesh with their
product is difficult. When the team I picked told me they were experts
in Ruby on Rails, my first thought was, “Is that a train or a
restaurant?” Thirdly, and by far the most important point, for those of
us not in the Web design or development community, feeling comfortable
with our evaluation of creatives is impossible.
This is a relatively young industry, one with very low barriers to
entry. Heck, my designer took his first client when he was 13. There are
very few, if any, metrics we can use to evaluate a
creative team. We can look at its past work, speak with the head of the
team and maybe get some sort of sample or mock-up, but for the most
part, we are flying blind. There are no requisite degrees,
certifications or guarantees. If you go to a physician who hasn’t
finished college, you probably wouldn’t be willing to let them operate
on you. A developer who hasn’t gone to college could build you the next
Foursquare.
The Search
In our search for a creative team, we come upon cousins and uncles of
acquaintances, people who have designed investor-relations websites for
Fortune 500 companies, people who wait tables but build iPhone apps on
weekends. We have absolutely
no idea what to think of all this.
First-time clients especially don’t understand how hard their product
is to create, or how long creative design takes, or even if you’ve done
this sort of work before. It’s all Japanese to them, and it’s an
enormous leap of faith.
All we can do is look at some of your prior work and decide whether we
like it. In what other sphere of life would you make a decision this
important on a gut reaction? (
Wait, don’t answer that. (http://3degreesnation.tumblr.com/post/11030883436/why-im-betting-it-all-on-a-gut-reaction))
It’d be like grabbing someone at the grocery store and asking them to
marry you because you both have Fruit Loops in your carts.
Even when we look at successful companies in our fields, their
success is not always commensurate with the development or design of
their products. Take
Craigslist (http://www.craigslist.org/): great business idea, poor design; but it doesn’t matter because the content is great. On the other hand,
Flipboard (http://flipboard.com/)’s
design is fantastic, and that’s enough to make the product successful,
even although its functionality isn’t really revolutionary.
Grasping For Control
With reservations and doubts lingering in the back of the client’s
mind, in steps the creative team. You start pumping stories into
Basecamp (http://basecamphq.com/),
PivotalTracker (https://www.pivotaltracker.com/)
or some other product-management system that the client’s never heard
of, and suddenly they are on your turf. Now the client works when you
work, and often sits quietly on their hands when you don’t. The product
goes when you say it goes, and their input is limited. Worst of all, we
flat out
don’t understand what you’re doing.
This is extremely hard for people who are used to complete control.
Your client has gained so much momentum to get to this point that, when
the creative team takes charge, the ground drops from under them like
they’re some unfortunate cartoon character. This reversal of control is
jarring.
This would be fine if the entrepreneur was working with a lawyer, an
accountant or even a bank. But early on in the life cycle of a company
that depends on a creative team for its success, nothing, and I mean
nothing,
is as important as the creative team. And our control over the success
of this phase is so limited. That’s why we make uninformed suggestions
like, “Let’s make that @ symbol spin,” and “I think users would like
some Shakira playing when they land on the home page. I know I would.”
Because we’re grasping at straws.
We are trying to hold onto our vision, because suddenly it’s in your
hands. We may know what we want, but we often don’t know how to do it,
and we have trouble expressing it. I’ve often found myself telling my
developer things like, “I want a magic search box that pulls information
from the Facebook API [I learned that term a few months ago, no big
deal], Twitter and Foursquare and spits out relevant people based on our
compatibility algorithm,” only to have him respond, “… Yeah. Let’s
start by allowing users to log in with their Facebook account.”
I know how I want the product to feel to the user, but I have no idea
how to get there without my team’s help. Saying, “I want it really
simple, easy to use and elegant” is not helpful.
Grasping at some visual element that we comprehend is sometimes the only bullet in our gun.
So, How Do You Deal With Overstressed, Irrational Clients?
Now you have an idea of the sometimes fragile psyche of the client.
The question is, how do you handle us when we say we want Shakira?
Sam’s points are all well taken and, for the most part, right on. But
they are directed at a rational, faceless client. The overview is good,
but implementing it in real life would be difficult. So, here is the
perspective of a client with a face. The following five actionable tips
should drastically help your client relationships.
- Show us.
This one is the most important. It’s very hard for us to visualize our idea. We know how we want the product to feel,
but we don’t know how to get there. We would certainly recognize that
Shakira isn’t the answer if you showed us this on our website — or on a
comparable website if building our mistake would be too time-consuming.
Usually, if the client was savvy enough to get to this step in the
process, they would know what works and what doesn’t. And if they don’t,
their idea is hopeless anyway.
-
- Tell us.
This one wasn’t in Sam’s points. Good entrepreneurs are flexible and can
adjust their vision to meet the reality of the situation. If we want
something, but you think it would take too long and not be worthwhile,
tell us. Suggest a workaround if you want, or just ask us if there’s
another way. Entrepreneurs are usually great at creative solutions; we
make our living by avoiding barriers. But we can only avoid barriers if
we know what they are.
-
- Explain the rules of the game.
If you’re building a basketball, you know what you can and can’t do. You
could probably make one that’s bouncier or more durable than competing
products. But you couldn’t make one that goes in the basket every time.
You know your limitations, but sometimes we don’t, and creativity is
only able to flourish inside the box of reality. Because we don’t know
the rules of the design and development game, we often don’t know what’s
possible. More often than not, we’ll assume that something isn’t
possible when it actually is. The head of my creative team had a good
solution for this: he created a folder of ridiculous ideas that I wished
could be part of the website, and I dumped stuff in there from time to
time. More often than not, he’d ping me saying, “Hey Brian, that’s
possible. Let’s try it out.” Being creative is difficult when the canvas
is blank. If you can give us a line to start with, some sense of what
you are capable of, it’ll help us enormously on the creative side.
-
- Be confident and enthusiastic.
Everyone appreciates an expert. Sam touches on this, and it’s extremely
important. When I told my designer that I was considering profile pages
that end users could design, he said something like, “Well, it certainly
worked for MySpace.” Point taken. Demonstrating your expertise puts
clients at ease and instills trust in your decision-making abilities.
Also, don’t be afraid to occasionally ask for forgiveness rather than
permission (as long as the change is not customer-facing). It will
reaffirm that we made the right decision. Nothing is more invigorating
than someone who believes in your vision.
-
- We can’t act like locals.
Clients aren’t completely oblivious to their mistakes, either. They know
that some of their suggestions are absurd. They know that they don’t
understand this stuff one-tenth as well as you do. They know they’ve
stepped into a subculture that they couldn’t possibly fit into. It’s
like when you go on a ski vacation and try to act like the locals. No
matter what you do, you won’t be one. And we hate that we are an
outsider in your world. That manifests itself in a number of ways: weird
suggestions, holding firm on an irrelevant point, demanding certain
color schemes that probably don’t matter (but sometimes do). This will
still happen, but now that you know where they’re coming from and how to
assuage them, you should hopefully have a more effective connection
with clients. On the flip side, expect to be treated with the same level
of suspicion and hesitation when you step into our world. Sam urges you
to speak the client’s language, to set goals in business terms. Be very
careful with that one. Misusing one business buzzword can waste your
credibility, just as one suggestion for a spinning @ symbol will make
you wary of any other design ideas. Discussing markets that you have
exposure to but aren’t immersed in can have adverse effects. Know that
we are all tourists. Which leads to the final point.
The Odd Couple
In writing this article, I realized how odd the relationship is
between creatives and clients. Without my creative team, I would have no
shot at getting my company off the ground. I rely on them 100%, but I
have no clue what they do, how they do it or if the work they do is
reasonably priced. This forces me to try to speak their language, to
attempt to enter their world by learning quickly, and to try to maintain
control of a vision that they are responsible for bringing to life.
Creatives, on the other hand, rely on clients only somewhat. They
don’t live and die by each project, as clients do. Their work is in
great demand; many of the firms I considered are growing quickly in this
recession.
However, bits and pieces of Web design and development work are
slowly being fragmented and commoditized, and for the same reasons that
evaluating designers and developers is difficult: the barriers to entry
are low. This opens the door for
99Designs to pick off clients,
especially vulnerable entrepreneurs. These services leverage the
crowdsourced model by matching designers who have little or no
experience with clients who don’t understand the nuances of the craft
well enough to be able to tell. This pushes creative firms to
differentiate themselves through means that clients can understand.
Business acumen is an incredibly helpful skill for creatives to have,
and something 99Designs can’t offer.
Summary
So, we’re left with two groups, each possibly operating in unknown
waters, working to create a product that requires both of them to be
firing on all cylinders in order to succeed. That being said, do
business-savvy creatives exist? Heck, yeah. I’ve got them helping me
build my company, and it makes all the difference in the world. Do
design- or development-savvy entrepreneurs exist? Probably. I’ve got a
Mac — does that count?
The goal is to establish a working relationship between the two
parties that leverages the strengths of each to quickly and effectively
create a product and bring it to market. The tips above should help
those working on the creative side. I’d be interested to hear a designer
or developer’s take on what I should be doing to get the best out of my
creative team. After all, we’ve got to have more in common than liking
Fruit Loops for this thing to work.
Go easy on us poor entrepreneurs. I realize we make dumb suggestions
sometimes, but it’s just an attempt to maintain some control over a
process that we occasionally feel we’ve lost control over. And consider
the business decisions that clients make from both sides. We’ve had a
lot of practice with this stuff.
Consider a company that is trying to choose between two consulting firms, each claiming to be a thought leader in solving a particularly thorny problem. One firm’s representative says, “We’ve written five posts in our firm’s blog this year,” while the other says, “Here are reprints of five articles we’ve published this year on the websites of your industry’s most influential professional associations.” 
