Designer Attitudes That Ruin Client Relationships
As designers, we shouldn’t be so quick blame our clients when things don’t work. When taxi drivers take a wrong turn, they don’t blame their passengers — they defer to their own knowledge and make informed decisions, preventing wrong turns all-together.
Yet too often we see designers — and even industry thought leaders — mocking client requests. For example: “Can you make the logo bigger?” is a classic client meme. But if you actually examine this request, the client is speaking from a position of fear. Put simply: they don’t know if their brand is well represented in your design.
We should take the time to actually examine our clients’ concerns rather than batting them away with copy and paste excerpts from the latest UX study. Lest we forget that our clients are accountable for our design in the real world — our work often means the difference between success and failure.
Common harmful designer attitudes
My wireframes are done, and so am I
Designs shipped and posted to Dribbble — time to relax, right? Wrong. Just because the design is approved doesn’t mean your work stops there. How often have you heard something like: “The developers on this project have hacked my beautiful design to pieces!” This occurs when design decisions are made by those who aren’t specialists and results in the use of inappropriate trends, outright copying or simply improvising.
You can avoid this by taking a hands-on approach: Be part of quality control and perform design advocacy — checking developers’ work to make sure it fits your design — when necessary. It can be difficult to please all of the stakeholders in any given project, but we need to hold firm in our convictions, know when to push back and use our better judgement.
Clients: They just don’t get it
We often accuse clients of not understanding design, trends or accepted UI patterns and we’re absolutely right. Clients don’t understand those things. When clients hire us they don’t always know the correct answers, so we need to be leaders: helping our clients through their fear of the unknown, and building confidence and trust in our work.
Let’s revisit the taxi driver analogy. If your driver starts talking about how awesome his new semi-active suspension is, you’re unlikely to understand. Just like our design clients, you’re mostly interested in whether you’re travelling in the right direction, on time and within budget.
It’s just business
Design is about finding a harmonious symmetry between aesthetic and business objectives, with the latter coming from our clients.
The motive behind every brush stroke and every line of code should be aimed at achieving our clients business objectives and not pleasing our colleagues on Dribbble or Github. Yes, pixel perfection is paramount, but so are our clients’ business objectives. Often in the long term, when they succeed, so do we.
How to take action and improve client relationships
In addition to being more understanding of and empathetic to client perspectives, we can greatly improve our working relationships with the following steps.
1. Involve your clients in the creative process early
At The Phuse, we work in a collaborative and iterative environment. This means that our clients are involved during every step of a project’s journey from concept to completion. Involving clients so heavily in our processes ultimately results in a collective feeling of accomplishment for everyone, and improves our understanding of the project’s objectives.
2. Test, test, test
Disagreements will always occur over design decisions and we should take the most appropriate action to resolve them. Often, commitment to testing is the best way to resolve disagreements since this results in scientific and actionable feedback.
3. Educate your clients
Include your clients in the process and deliver proper explanations when you ship your work. Taking design decisions without describing your rationale can seem imposing and even if your decisions have a solid UX grounding your client isn’t going to know unless you tell them.
When clients understand your motives, they feel included in the process and they’ll be more likely to fight for your design when the director of marketing wants to make the logo bigger.
4. Work with other specialists
Each member of our team specializes in their chosen discipline, which gives us solid ground on which to make informed decisions on projects. Being specialized means that we can more easily extract relevant objectives, correlate them with user goals and make informed design choices; thus avoiding design-by-committee.
