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I just wanted to get your input on how you handle clients when in the discovery phase of a new site.
DO you:
(a) suggest/push a design on the client (with an attitude that I am the expert, you hired me, so listen up)
(b) tell the client that you will create any design they like, being obsequious.
(c) listen to the clients needs/wants and try to compromise design taking into account SE placement, download speed etc
(d) vary your approach depending on if it is a full moon out
Again I am just trying to get an idea of your approaches.
Personally I tend to go with (c) myself.
I can't imagine hiring a housepainter who would say "I'm sorry, I'm a professional, and that color won't look good on your house so I won't paint it."
I do tell my clients what I think; sometimes very forcefully, if they are good clients making bad decisions. I won't hesitate to tell them that they are hiring me because I have expertise that they lack. But in the end, I will do what my client wants. At least until I win the lottery :)
Don
I listen, let them give me their full scope and how they want it presented. I then do a followup using a "polite A". I explain why I made the design the way I did. I normally give them two or three design choices that I have made.
I know the customer is paying the bills. Education, in my mind, will make them more money down the road or will create more traffic and exposure.
Brian
I can however, imagine an "exterior design consultant" asking a client what they will be having painted, and offering an "appropriate and tasteful" selection of paint chips for that purpose. ;)
If the client walks in thinking "chartreuse," and the painter offers a chip selection including "muted lime" it's a win-win-win situation (third "win" included on behalf of the neighbors who don't have to stare at a chartreuse house after all...)
I found that many people (clients included) have an idea of what they want to have in terms of what they like to see. Which is altogether narrow-minded. Design is about being as broad and accomodating as possible.
What good is a flash intro if it has nothing to offer besides razzle dazzle, besides being a search engine nightmare? What point is there to putting the navigation to the right, when countless studies show people feel more comfortable on the left, or above?
Will you accomodate them? Most likely you'll spend hours trying to convince them to steer clear of their obvious design folleys, and it'll soon become a ramming of the goats. What I find happens most often is, give them what they want, and slowly introduce different concepts. Before you know it, they gain trust in you and you are on your way to creating a great website. The trick is not making hundreds of revisions.
Bottom line is most people are stupid, thoughtless morons, you must be the shepard, you must guide them into usability bliss.
-meannate
I find that most people have a bottom line of what the EXPECT and just let us get there however we can, as long as we stay with-in the "Company's Profile".
Design and marketing are 2 very different things.
I agree with CraigF, but sometimes you have to break the approach into sections.
Design flow.
Marketing Input.
Updates.
With the PPC SE's, some folks we deal with know about them well enough to work the marketing end themselves and we just do the design and maintainance.
Hope that helps ya some.
Spinner
Yes, and they're paying OUR bill, which means we owe them our best. Long term our reputations will soar only if our clients succeed. If they don't, that will be seen as our fault and we can end up a scapegoat.
I won't bow down to a client decision that I feel is suicidal. At the same time, I work hard to separate my preferences from my knowledge, so the client learns to trust my input as solid, and not just opinionated.
I generally find that if that can be clearly decided before anything else then most people can come up with sensible ideas...it's only when they don't really know why they want it that they randomly grab from a shopping list of what other sites have got
the question I have is how many people here begin by gettingthe client to decide exactly why they want a web site?
I guess that's why marketers are different than designers. I start out by asking what the clients needs are. What do they want to accomplish with a web site? How does it fit into their business strategy? What IS their business strategy? How will a web site help them make money?
Learn more about their business, and you might be surprised to find out that some of their ideas may be pretty good :)
Don
I can however, imagine an "exterior design consultant" asking a client what they will be having painted, and offering an "appropriate and tasteful" selection of paint chips for that purpose.
Which is what I do, as I said, sometimes forcefully. (not with paint chips, with ideas:)) But unless the clients decisions are unethical or will reflect so badly on me that my business will be affected, I will do the best job possible for them within the guidelines of what they want.
Don
Your client's marketing folks know (or should know) their clients/other stakeholders and how to influence them much better than you. That's a big part of their job. And obviously very important for revenue.
You however are the expert in how to optimise their communications in this channel. So perhaps isn't the winning combination (c)?
That being said, it is pretty important to have a good meeting/decision making procedures. 5 hours of circular arguements is a capital crime. Or punishment for one.
Still perhaps it is more adult than screaming matches over the colour of a button. :-)
a is the way forward, but just let the client think your doing c, let them choose the colours.
Killer answer!
I generally have a good listen/chat at the 'meeting' then knock up something that suits what I think they want but with built in seo, accessability, etc, etc and take it from their.
Usually gives a good basis for discussion at the least as many of the clients I'm building for don't really know what they want till they see something.
There are still many people who don't know why they want a website. If they can't answer the question, then you are in the drivers seat. You can tell them why they want a website, who their visitors are going to be, and what it is going to produce for rewards. At that point, you can finish with a classic, in order to accomplish that, we will need to design the site this way to attract that customer or visitor.
The difficult ones, are the people who have a vastly detailed littenay of reasons they want a website. They have a mental picture of what the site should look like and operate. Most of those that have detail visions, are hell to negotiate with. If that is the case, you have no room to work - skip the convince them stage and tell them they are 100% on the right track and head straight to the seo design concerns.
If there are some major red flags, then stop and try to correct them. If you are dealing with Joes five and dime liqour store on the corner and wants to sell Ripple by the ounce, then that 200k opening flash page probably isn't a real good idea. On the other hand, if you are selling diamonds and porshe's, you probably can get away with that 200k page since all those rich folks have dsl or cable.
I think it all depends on what the client expects. If they are after a "show me something" type pitch, then do your best to address their needs with your best stuff.
I have this one knobstick who got a 'designer' to give me a FP made interpretation of what it should look like: you should see this monstrosity!
So I told him that if he wants that I'd have to downgrade the spec from xhtml-strict to acomplish and he got all upset :-)
This guys so funny, he's a reall 'know it all' in that he knows nothing The real funny thing is that you'd expect the chairman of a middle sized biz to be confident enough to admit that he doesn't know about stuff but he just bluffs his way through the lot.
Now whenever he miffs me I just talk rubbish at him as if he should understand it and he quitens down.
People are weird but clients just a world apart!
It's that bandwagon mentality (ie everyone has a website) and it is good for those in the design business. Since they don't know what they want that empowers us, the designers, to tell them what they want. I find myself taking steps (sometimes very time consuming one) to ensure that my clients site not only looks good, but performs as it should and is functional. One of my current clients is in the IT field and I fully expected him to understand that I not only does his site look good but it has a 40K page weight. His reply, "is that good?"
It is a good thing that I am honest because when it comes to web design you can snow a client so badly that they'll be shovelling until June.
So let's be professional, helpful, and creative. Be a persuasive salesman and inform your clients. You wil be selling your self and word of mouth from informed and satisfied clients will make you a popular designer. My current client has given my 4 more possible clients and I haven't even finished his site.
A very effective strategy with impossible know-it-all clients. However, I've found it's equally effective to just talk the truth at them, instead of rubbish, as long as you use technical terminology. With the ones who like to bluff, you effectively outbluff them with the detailed, gory, technical detailed truth, and they have no choice but to a) admit they have no clue what you're talking about, or b) agree with everything you just said because they don't understand a word of it. Either way, you win.
But understand, I would only recommend such a borderline underhanded negotiating technique with the aforementioned absolutely impossible type of client. With basically nice people who admit they have no idea what I'm talking about, I try to get them to ask me lots of questions, and I try to educate them as I go along, giving them the gory truth in layman's terms.
I've had two clients give me fairly large jobs, because they said they liked my attitude more than my competition (who they'd already talked to). :)
With basically nice people who admit they have no idea what I'm talking about, I try to get them to ask me lots of questions, and I try to educate them as I go along, giving them the gory truth in layman's terms.
Yeah, I love the women clients, they don't mind admitting ignorance, and why would they?
I like to tell people that the web is not complicated, because it isn't but I fear there are many people that do the 'sucking teeth, oooh that's gonna be tricky' trick that all professions play to a certain extent.
I think the men bluff it way more for the same reason that we drink to much and are way to proud of our bodily noises than is healthy (especiially englishmen) We just havn't got it as sussed as the girls :-)
Then again, the male clients I've worked for basically acted the same way during initial interview without a female partner present: "nod, nod, [insert *gotcha* question here] nod, nod, OK, sounds good" I've been awfully lucky in 9 out of 10 cases with client attitude. Mostly all very agreeable.
I am of the opinion that clients (most of the time) DO NOT HAVE A CLUE what they want or why they want/need it.
I wish I could spend all this time fighting over design issues with my clients. I'm too busy fighting over the bill! :)
But I guess that's another thread...
Don
