When clients don’t give a fuck

We had to give a demo of a project to the client on today’s meeting. It was the first demo of a new mobile app, both in android and iOS with backend system. We had been working on the project for the last 2 weeks.

We arrived at the client’s office with little nervousness. “Oh what if he clicked the next button, there was bug on that page.” With all that is mind, we started showing the backend system to him. During this whole period client was silent and listening while our developer was busy explaining how user can add images, make text bolder and how the user can’t add the data if fields are left blank. The meeting went on.

After 5 minutes, client turned to us. His faced appeared as if he has realised something very new that didn’t came to his mind earlier. Then he started telling, how we should sub categorise information in different menus. Susan started noting his words. He went on and on. He told us about different types of clients they have to deal in his office, how different sorts of problems they face. He went on and on for next 2 hours of which only 5% of information were relevant to the app.

During this period, I interrupted and started showing the app to him. As soon as I showed home screen to him, he paused me. He then stated telling me how we should add new menu items and how you should change the content based on who is using the app. I was like “WTF, then why didn’t you fucking pointed it out when we sent the mockups and SRS?” I then told him that you accepted the design we sent you earlier and the app was according to that design. He then nodded and started telling story of how his clients behaved with him the other day.

After the demo we were quite upset. We were like “it took us 5 fucking hours to complete that screen. Why the fuck can’t you see it for like 30 seconds.” I know that clients are not supposed to know most of the things related to the technology and the process of developing the system. But I think they should listen to us. He should have listened to me when I said, mockups were like blueprint of the building and once you make a house with that building, it is hard to make changes to it. I wish he had listed to me when I said look this is the trend now you can simply add 20 items in menu. But they don’t listen, do they?

This is not the first time, I had this experience. Our old client also had the same behaviours. They keep telling how the system should look and behave on each meeting over week. And in each of those weeks, there will be different version of it. They won’t see if the system is working properly or how much we have developed the system and at the end they will expect a product from us that meets their each and every requirements.

The major factor I think in this phenomena is that clients are not aware of what they want to build when we are starting the project. They have very high level view of how their system should. I relate it to our imagination of say, our dream house. We can explain that the dream house should look like this and that. But if it was built in seconds and brought right in front of us, we will suddenly realise that “Oh god this is not the way I dreamt it!” I know that will happen. I fucking guarantee it.

So we are looking into other ways of solving theses problems. We will be following agile methodology more strictly and we will be asking clients time and again to check mockups before approving. Clients here in Nepal don’t have that good understanding of software development. This surely would improve in future as most of the business courses now teach fundamental principles of software development. Working with this new generation of clients would be much easier!