Client manipulation tactics and why it’s all just good UX.

“Devious!” my friend said, “so you just manipulate the hell of out every situation. Am I being manipulated right now?” She probably was, but the original act that caused her to both revile and revere me is lost from memory. Her calling my tactics to get work approved devious and manipulative is still fresh.

See, I’m like any other designer turned UX practitioner. I’m basically a baby raccoon who sees something shiny when a new project comes up. I just want to get my freakish baby raccoon fingers all over it and wash it and play with it and come up with a zillion ideas for how to make it cool. More interesting, never been done before, a delight for the user and extremely functional for the company. And then we negotiate prices, we win some, we lose some, but we all move forward with a signed statement of work that we deliver on.

This is where the bright eyes and exclamations of “oooh shiny!” have to be tempered by budgets and timelines. Therefore, at some point, you’ll find me in a meeting selling the client the work. This is where I have a narrow focus of protecting what my team and I have drafted, making the client happy, and getting paid. Let’s not pretend like getting paid isn’t noble: I do what I do and charge what I charge so my team can have the life we need with enough time and space to do good work. So when it comes down to showing work, getting a quality review and getting work approved, built, and paid for I’ve developed a set of tactics. Manipulative tactics that meet my end goal.

The first time I was introduced to client manipulation was in design school. A professor told a story about how he would show work. Right before the big reveal he’d offer everyone some gummy bears. Wait until they all start chomping and /SWIPE/ off comes the black cloth and the work is revealed. Clients, mouths all gummed up, have to keep chewing instead of immediately tell if you they like it not. This gave him the opportunity to explain decisions and why the solution met the brief, etc. Genius! Devious! I think gummy bears must have tasted better back then, I can’t seem to get everyone to glue their mouths shut with these godawful high fructose corn syrup globs we have now. It’s also very hard to orchestrate a full room of executives chowing down on gummy bears without it seeming like you are trying to roofie them or something. However, that did teach me the most valuable tactic in the toolbox:

Feed them sugar.

I will never allow a client to look at work if they aren’t in the very best frame of mind. You don’t want someone who is hungry, hangry, or just has, like 2 minutes between meetings, let me take this call, hold on, ok, let’s look at the strategy for this $80k site, I’m down to 1 minute, hold on, ok.

Never fall for that. Control the meeting and come back later if someone is too busy. Do not show an ounce of work to that person.

I had a client rush into a 2pm meeting once, sorry she was late, grrrr, hadn’t even had lunch yet. Uh oh. “Would you eat a protein bar if I gave you one?” I asked her. YES! She said yes, I fed her a protein bar (always keep an extra couple in your bag) and the project went off without a hitch.

So a rushed or hangry situation is no good and you have to force control those. However, like me, most people are generally hungry all the time. This is when you feed them sugar. Take donuts, take fancy coffees, take candy. Take whatever. Have a donut, chat about the weather, gauge your moment…

When everyone is sufficiently sugared up show them the work.

WOW! HOLY SHIT THAT IS SOME GOOD WORK! I LOVE YOU!

And then, and this is crucial, get the hell out of there before the sugar crash.

Dress for outcome.

We’ve heard this a thousand times, but it bears mentioning. Especially if we keep reading these articles about millennials and how they do better work in jeans and a t-shirt. Oh that topic, can we quit treating millennials like magical fucking unicorns? I’m technically a millennial and I know what to wear and when.

So, dress to impress. And that will very often mean a t-shirt and jeans. I’ve worked with the boys for long enough to know that yes, I’m a girl, and no, I don’t need to exacerbate the situation by wearing a dress to sit down with the developers. Even better if you can get a somewhat mysterious-but-job-related t-shirt to wear. SAUL & MILTON & PAUL & HERB. Done. Hustle & Project Flow. Done.

There was this group of women that had to work with the boys at my last gig. Tall, beautiful, stiletto wearing, Vogue-esque women. I think they walked in a V-formation to both be super intimidating and to create their own wind so that each of their long, shiny locks would be perfectly flowing. And they knew their shit and would take you to the mat. They were from the East Coast and would come in to Salt Lake City for meetings. The boys sent me to talk to them. Sheesh, I can do jeans and a t-shirt, but the lady mob was a new story. So I went out, I bought the right outfits and I did it. And they loved me and they loved the work and we all got paid.

Let me make this easy on you:

Suits — actual well cut, serious suits — for banks and executive meetings. Black or dark colors because we are consultants and they are paying a lot of money to listen to us.
Jeans & T-shirts for developers. We get it and we’re not going to be douchey like those dicks in the suits.
Business Casual. I couldn’t hate this more if I tried. Especially for women. If you are doing work for a large company with a dress code, you must dress to the level of your contact. Trust me, those women don’t want to wear that shit either, so don’t over do it in designer dresses and don’t roll in like a shlub because, inevitably, that will be the day her boss wants to join your meeting. Don’t let your appearance give the project a feeling of a run away train.

Real collaboration.

I’m going to talk about fake collaboration next and sound like a total asshole, so pay more attention to this section. I take paper to meetings. Like a damn luddite. I have had every single newest bestest Apple gadget the day it comes off the line. I’ve camped out for that shit, and I take paper to meetings. Like a lot of paper, sometimes color-coded with different paper clips and people’s names on each packet. I recently rolled up to a meeting with a six foot printout of their website so we could talk overall strategy on the content. Paper. And markers. And not a screen to be seen.

This fosters a lot more collaboration. Paper is strewn everywhere and moved around, nothing is sacred, we draw on it, we make notes, every little comment they have for us is scribbled out with big circles and stars. New layouts are sketched. It’s very active and engaging.

Here is where it gets a touch manipulative — no screens means I stay in control of the meeting and its outcome. No tangents while someone looks something up they saw real quick that was super cool. No technical issues. And no screen between me and my client like when people take a laptop in. If I wanted you to look at the glowing logo on my laptop and wonder what I’m typing or if I’m surfing the web I’d invite you to my underground lair to watch me work.

For the record, we come back to the office and digitize the whole mess. Either in our meeting recap notes, by capturing images for Evernote or by transferring change requests to the project in InVision so we all (clients included) have a copy all the time.

Fake collaboration.

Some clients have to leave their mark. I once had a client say to me, “I’m having a hard time coming up with anything you should change.” As in, they would keep looking in order to leave their mark and be involved. I gently (just kidding, I probably slapped them first) told them that since we’d worked together on the brief that it was entirely possible that the work delivered exactly what they needed. There wasn’t any reason to try to force a change on it if it met his original brief. Did you notice the change about the brief ‘we’ worked on to it becoming ‘his’ brief? BAM. Ownership. Mark made. Approve and pay me.

That was an easy one, sometimes there is a client that still needs to leave his mark. So we let them. In a controlled manner. We find the thing they love or the thing they hate and then we use that. It sounds very Godfather-y, but really, if we know you are a stickler on spelling there will be an error or two for you to catch. Love to get down and dirty with the stock photos? We’ll throw up the first thing we see then come back the next round with the far better one we had in the wings. This allows a client to leave his mark without that suddenly becoming, “can we see something totally new? I was working on a layout with my wife/kid/dog last night…”

Write some damn copy.

Clients will never give you content when you need it. Period. Don’t give me crap about building it into your process and designing for content. I get it. I love a good rainbow too. Quit waiting for your client to provide content. I don’t care if you are not the copywriter, everyone from the developer to the designer to the account manager can help create some content. “That’s not my job!” Whatever. Getting paid for work you do is your job, so let’s get this ball rolling and get the final check here sooner.

Do some research — just a little — and write something. Have one other person read it to catch typos and grammatical errors so you don’t sound like an idiot and then put that in the comp and show it to the client. There are only two outcomes here.

This is great! Just a couple changes. — BLAMMO, the golden light of the Promised Land.
This is terrible! Where did this even come from? — “Just something we threw in there since we didn’t have copy yet, it’s more to show how much content we’re looking for than anything. Can you get me something, about that length, by the end of the week so it will be better/more real for the next review?” Done, if only so they never have to see that drivel again.

Did I just manipulate the client into moving forward with content? Yup. No shame about that one.

Good UX is manipulation.

See? Those aren’t so bad. People aren’t overly manipulated (in a negative way). Here’s the real kicker though — manipulating the situation, doing what you can to produce the desired outcome — that’s just good UX. If something is fun, puts us at ease and is delightful we will flow through it with barely a notice.

There is nary a difference between choosing a great color palette and dressing for outcome. Making sure a client is in the best frame of mind is exactly the same as creating a positive emotional state when we write graceful, non blaming error messages. I’d like to see more designers and developers take the same attention to craft when they present and sell their work as when they do their work. Doing the work is only half the equation, selling it is where you get to the solution of the equation — payment.

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