Clients From Hell
An honest advice based on my own experience as a young designer accepting her first few freelance projects. This is for designers who charge clients by project, not by hour.
It started like this; a client contacted me with a business idea in need of design. I liked the idea and wrote back saying that I’d like to make a quick call to discuss their idea.
We had a skype meeting and they explained the business in more detail and described what they needed from me. Afterwards, they sent their requirements and I came up with a suitable timeline and cost and shared them. We both agreed on everything and I got down to work.
All went well; I handed over the design, got paid aaand we were done, right?
No.
Emails started to pop up in my inbox…new requirements; not design fixes, new requirements. And they wanted them for free, because:
“these are only small things, won’t take time, right?”
It’s hard to deal with these things when you’re just starting your career, so I accepted to do the new stuff, not only to keep a good business relationship with the client but also because I didn’t want the design to look like it has two different styles if I refused and they asked someone else to design the new screens.
That’s when the project started to resemble No-Face, it began to eat up every spare minute of my working day.
…and what started as a small app became something of undefinable proportions. I begin to lose my patience and asked for extra payment.
“Ok, I’ll pay you for the extra work..can’t cost more than $100, right?”
How do you even answer a question like that??? It took a bunch of emails and calls to convince them to pay up. It was a horrible, exhausting process. But a good lesson, nonetheless.
It’s not a problem of a bad client. Don’t get me wrong, some clients are awful, materialistic people with no work ethics. But this isn’t the case here. Some clients are founders who have no clue of the size of their own idea, so they just keep asking for new things when they need them. And you end up working on a ghoulish project that never seems to end.
There is a magic step you must not forget if you don’t want to fall into such trap:
Based on your UX knowledge and your first meeting outcomes, write a project scope and add it to your contract.
You may not cover everything, but if you invest sometime in brainstorming the project’s future requirements with the help of your UX knowledge and what the client already told you, you will cover a huge chunk of it. And once you explain scientifically why you added every feature to the scope, they will be convinced to pay for each one of them.
If they do ask for anything else, it will be less like requirement, more like extra feature (which you may even advise them against implementing).
This discussion should take place before you decide the timeline and cost. Explain clearly that this is what your product needs to succeed at this point. And that should they need to add any new feature for whatever reason, it will be with a new contract and a payment that you decide based on your time and the feature’s size.
Don’t be afraid. Write it down clearly & professionally and most of the time they will see no reason not to accept. You will even make them feel more secure that they’re dealing with someone who can manage their business so well.
That’s it. easy, no?
I hope you never face a ghoulish project in your entire design career. Bye for now! Have fun and #keepDesigning
