What’s with the attitude?
Posted in Random on: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 by Paul Boag
We face many challenges as designers and developers – IE6, the fast pace or change, meeting the needs of disabled users. However, I am coming to believe that our biggest challenge is our own attitude.
This post started off as a bit of fun. It was going to be another spoof, this time in the form of a top 10 list of harsh truths. However, as I began writing I found myself actually believing many of the points. In the end I was forced to scrap that draft and start from scratch.
I am worried about how people see us as web designers. More than that, I am worried how we behave as web designers, both with our clients and towards one another.
Let me explain what I mean, starting with the more obvious and damaging area – our attitude towards clients.
Our attitude towards clients
I speak to a lot of web designers and in all of those conversations I rarely hear a positive word said about the people who keep us employed.
The overwhelming attitude towards clients is one of disdain. Oh, we hide our feelings reasonably well when dealing with them face to face. However, behind their backs we are often critical and derisive.
We see clients as stupid, awkward, or intent on derailing the project. In short we see them as the enemy.
We have to change this attitude. Not only is it damaging to the relationship, it is also untrue. Just because somebody doesn’t understand the web, does not make them an idiot. Without a doubt they will be far more knowledgeable than you in many, many areas.
You cannot have it both ways. On one hand we set ourselves up as experts who should be listened to. On the other, we are surprised that the client doesn’t instinctively know, understand and except everything we suggest. If they could, we would not be the expert!
We need to recognise the critical role the client brings to the web design process and stop trying to exclude them for fear they might bring something different to the table we might not like.
Stop treating your clients like children and start treating them as peers. That means listening to their contributions even when it does not sit comfortably with your own views. This involves us losing our sense of moral superiority.
You do not have the moral high ground
I do not hide the fact that I am an evangelical christian. That means associating myself with some people who have an enormous sense of smug satisfaction and moral superiority. Some of these people really think they are ‘Gods gift,’ literally! However, they pale in comparison to the moral and intellectual snobbery I encounter in the web design community.
I am fed up with web designers who judge others (and their own clients) with such passion and vigour it borders on the fanatical.
We are not poets, artists or preachers. We do not have the luxury of free thinking theory. We should be pragmatists that work in the real world and solve real world problems.
The problem is that most of our high minded ideals are nothing more than ego. It is about exalting ourselves at the expense of others. Let me give you a few examples of what I mean…
Why doesn’t your site validate?
I can’t believe they code in .net
He is always asking people to retweet his posts.
Oh, they are just link baiting
Comments like that are just about pulling others down. Validation isn’t everything and how can you judge somebody’s decision to code in a certain language without any background information? Hell, what does it matter to you anyway? As for link baiting and retweeting – what is wrong with wanting to drive traffic? There seems to be an attitude that desiring your site to be popular and working towards that end, is in someway wrong! Admittedly new traffic is not the whole story but it is a part of it.
Promoting your sites or services is not desperate or needy. It is good business. If all you offer clients is moral superiority and a well built site, then you are only offering them half a service.
I am not saying there are no lines. I do not condone black hat SEO techniques and I hate SPAM as much as the next person. However, I think we need to drop the attitude and consider the broader picture. We need to consider the business behind the site.
Stop trying to be intellectually superior
Unfortunately we do not just like to feel morally superior, we also like to feel intellectually superior.
We dress our profession up in impenetrable jargon and give ourselves fancy job titles. In many ways we are like teenagers trying to appear more grown up by smoking and drinking.
I guess this is not surprising. Our industry is barely in its teens. We are trying to find our identity and justify our existence. However, in the process we are in danger of becoming elitist and inaccessible to outsiders.
Take for example the recent rash of Top 10 posts. It is something I have started doing myself and have received a massive amount of criticism for it. I have been accused of dumbing down, catering for the lowest common denominator and being desperate for traffic.
Indeed top 10 posts do drive more traffic. That is because people like them. They like them because they are accessible. They are easy to scan and easy to assimilate. In what way is that bad?
Those who criticise do so because they feel that in some way these posts cheapen the industry or devalue what we do. I get the same criticism about my podcast. We joke on the show and have fun. We make the information accessible. Therefore we must be devaluing it.
In my opinion this is a view driven by insecurity. By wrapping up what you say in long words and impenetrable jargon you can hide the truth. You can sound better than you really are.
Unfortunately this just isn’t true. By making it impenetrable you are actually hiding its worth. By explaining what you know in a clear and accessible way you demonstrate its real value.
The desire for exclusivity
All of this is driven by a desire to the ‘cool kid’. Perhaps it is a hang over from our school days when geeks were far from popular. We try to impress and dominate, when we should be empathising and working together.
Another manifestation of this cool kid mentality is our rejection of anything mainstream. As soon as something becomes popular we drop it like a stone. Now our clients are talking about twitter, we accuse them of ruining it and start looking for the next thing. We want to be exclusive, special, different.
The trouble is the mainstream pays the bills. We need to break out of our exclusive little bubble and try to associate more closely with that mainstream. We need to understand what the general populace are embracing and go with that, even if it means still supporting IE6.
Conclusion
This post is aimed as much at myself as anybody else. I catch myself doing many of the things I have written about here.
In many ways the web design community is awesome. There are not many industries where direct competitors talk to one another so openly and freely. However in doing so we have become somewhat insular and very intense. I think sometimes we are under the impression that we are shaping the future and that every choice we make is of crucial importance.
At the end of the day we are just building websites. We need to get some perspective.
Thus ends the rant :p
39 Comments
Comments are for the discussion of this post. If you have other questions / comments then post them to the forum or send me an email
Bad day?
Otherwise another good post :)
Some excellent points. Thanks. Why does this attitude seem so wide spread in the web design business (and I have to admit I catch myself at it sometimes too)? It’s not a regulated profession and we all have different backgrounds, abilities and notions about how we should do our jobs. I’m just afraid that on this blog you are preaching to the converted and the offenders are probably not bothered to read it. When I start to get an attitude about how someone’s doing there business here, I tell myself “we are all just trying to make a living”.
Good article there Paul. On the whole I agree, however, the vast number of clients I know would like to think they know more than me on the subject of design, be it web, print or whatever. Clients need to realise that they are actually paying a designer for their skills. They are paying for all the years of experience in what works and what doesn’t and it saddens me to say that some clients still view designers as literally robots to command their own personal tastes – to Hell with all your years of experience and whatnot, they want to have created what they have thought up but cannot fully articulate and do not have the skills to do so. Web designers seem to have this stigma attached to them that they have ‘attitudes’ when in reality it simply boils down to the fact that web designers know what to do and more importantly how to execute it properly and effectively. I think more education is needed rather than a mass change of attitude. Seeing that a client fully understands the reasoning behind something is important – it’s more important they learn about the technology and medium in relation to how their visitors will ‘view’ their website. How about getting clients in for half a day’s training on what the internet actually ‘is’.
I agree completely, Paul.
I think that one possible reason why we sometimes ‘look down’ on clients (and occasionally outright distrust their opinion) is that as web professionals, we surround ourselves with technology, as do those who work alongside us – we can seldom afford to be unplugged as it’s our livelihood.
With such a focus on the technical minutiae of the job we do (particularly when focusing on areas such as accessibility), we start to think that everyone has our depth of knowledge and is as obsessed with the web as we have to be. Thus, any question that they ask comes out as a ’stupid question’, resulting in a self-fulfilling prophecy that ‘clients don’t know what they’re on about’.
Professional snobbery is a dangerous side effect of many occupations (I’ve known several engineers and scientists who have mocked my lack of mechanical or theoretical knowledge) and we’re by no means the worst of the bunch, but it never hurts to read an article like this once in a while to snap things back into perspective.
I think you nailed it with that “In my opinion this is a view driven by insecurity”.
Among other things I am also sign language interpreter (in Slovene sign language) and once I interpreted workshop by Tom Best who is NLP teacher.
During the break we had opportunity to chat and I mentioned him, that I value sense of humor very much. He said that you should run away from the shamans who take everything too serious.
I guess if you diss everybody it just shows you don’t have the true knowledge. The other thing is that you learn the most when you teach.
I wanted to reply by Twitter, but the 140 aren’t enough :)
Paul,
I think what upsets me the most is that at times clients treat you as a pixel pusher and not a designer.
In regards to your point about not being intellectually superior:
A web designer must assert that they are knowledgeable about the web. Otherwise clients will walk all over you with repetitive changes that do not help the client in any way.
Arrogance is bad and will hurt business, but confidence is a key factor to success.
Hmmm, I don’t think I’m in the right frame of mind to respond to this post, although I hear what you’re saying and it’s been on my mind too recently.
I act like an inconsiderate knob sometimes because I can make my own hours, email and call friends in *their* work hours if I so wish, post on Twitter that I’m sacking off work for the morning to watch another few One Foot In The Grave episodes etc. I must come off like a right rebel – just like I was in school I suppose.
I often wonder what this says about me (and other web designers/developers) to my friends and acquaintances. I’ve only just turned 24yrs old, so I’m still pretty young for this, but I’m starting to understand people like me, my age, are creating a legacy for our future years and I’d like it to be a good one.
I was thinking over Xmas; I would dread to be a banker over the (extended) family meal today. I don’t want that to be the case one Xmas in five years time because we’ve carved ourselves such a feeble industry reputation.
I’ll leave it there…
At SXSW last year, John Gruber said explicitly that in order to be a good designer, you had to be an a**hole. This is absurd. Some of my best work has come when I worked through a design with a client. They challenge my thinking, I challenge theirs.
Great article, and great perspective. Looking in the mirror is always a good place to start. I’ve worked both in-house for a company, as well as in an agency. Here are my thoughts.
The problem lies in that we too often skip steps in the process. A project needs to be planned, and clear goals need to be stated. As designers and developers, we enjoy the fact that we don’t work on the same project every day. We get a client, a project, we bang it out and move on. Our goals tend to be short focused on creating something that looks and functions really great. The client has more long-term needs that require measurable results, and they’re looking for a return on their investment. By stating specific goals in the beginning, it’s easier to come together.
Some agreements, some disagreements. Responding as a list!
* Our attitude towards clients
Agree completely. If you really have a bad client, don’t work with them at all. Otherwise, as with all people, I don’t ever think it is right to talk about them behind their backs.
* Moral high ground
Disagree to an extent. Some don’t get the balance right on this, and do indeed become fanatical. But as long as it is balanced in a practical sense and you do what is good for the client I think taken a strong view on comparatively small issues is a good thing. That’s why we have open source, semantically well formed sites, CSS, accessible websites, a choice of languages and quality articles about the subject of web development. Being highly critical and passionate is what drives the industry forward. It is the fact that people are fighting to give up support for IE6, that we will be able to give it up earlier.
* Intellectual superiority
Jargon is a good shortcut in conversations. You can’t, nor should you, escape it. But we should indeed be careful about who we talk to when we use it. I think this is just a communication issue, not intellectual superiority.
As far as the top 10 posts are concerned, I understand your point. But they are dumbed down content (in general, not always). Easy to read, but easy to write too. Not much thought generally goes into them, they say obvious things and add little original thought. Again, not always, but I think the format encourages it. They are the summary at the end of a chapter, not the meat of an idea. They are accessible because there is little to understand, not because we grasp the message easily. Is that okay, if it drives traffic? Yes, I think so. But the type of traffic is also important and that is worth considering.
* Cool kid
We have Twitter, because of early adopters that like to be one step ahead of the mainstream. I’m one of the people that follow directly after them and I appreciate that group of people because of that.
* Finally
We ARE shaping the future and what we do is important. It’s a good attitude to have.
Possibly the best thing I’ve read about web design this year. I often wonder how some of the ‘A-list’ of the web design conference circuit manage to get repeat business the way they bang on about how useless their clients are. All I can assume is a. their clients don’t read twitter and b. the conference circuit and books provide more than enough of a salary that they can pick and choose their clients and toss them away at the end of the project.
“At the end of the day we are just building websites.”
I don’t think it’s helpful to chastise web developers for being a bunch of self-centered hipster monsters, especially when it’s not entirely warranted. Unfortunately, a lot of clients see it as “just” building a web site, and fail to discern the amount of expertise, experience, and work that goes into building an excellent web site. When a project overseer demands why “just” a website starts at $5,000 and a small-enterprise-level rebuild of a site may cost ten to 100 times that, it’s hard not to react with a bit of scorn.
Nobody likes to feel like their work isn’t worth anything, especially when skilled members of their profession are as few and far between as good web developers seem to be. When people feel like their work and experience isn’t worthwhile, their attitude sours and morale breaks down. I think that “awful client” anecdotes that web developers pass back and forth isn’t symptom of bad attitude. It’s a way of venting frustration to sympathetic ears in an essentially harmless (and often humorous) way. The few doctors I know often tell amusing or informative anecdotes about their patients (any identifiers removed, of course) to one another. It’s a social salve that helps one get past their frustration and get back to doing good work.
I also take exception to your assertion that web developers aren’t artists. Perhaps we have differing definitions of what an artist is, but a well-constructed design and execution of a site, from back-end to front-end is art. In the same way that industrial design is art, and architecture is art. Just because you’re getting paid for it, and it doesn’t increase in value after you’re dead doesn’t mean that something isn’t art.
Our first year and a half in business, we were…well…very difficult to be around. Charging too little, letting clients dictate design, and taking every project that came our way led to LOTS of client resentment and a poorer product on our end. We were grumpy, pretentious, and miserable.
Here’s how we turned it around and learned to actually LOVE what we do and LOVE our clients:
1) We increased what we charged by 5-10x over the course of 6 months or so.
2) We drastically increased the quality of our product by pulling in better designers/devs, as well as doing much more planning and research.
3) We were very strict with what clients we took, turning away more than we accepted.
Now we spend weeks educating our clients (during our discovery and IA meetings) about what to expect with design, how to interpret prototypes, principles of usability, etc. By the time initial designs are in, they are fully prepped with a respect for the designer and an understanding of the process and project.
Respect your clients and they will respect you. Care enough to be their friends and they might even like you. :)
Wow, guys seriously, who cares what the client treats you like? You offer a service, and part of it is in fact pixel pushing, get over the insecurity of that.
Isn’t the job essentially about providing the ‘customer’ with the service they desire for the results they pay for? Design is subjective and if a client want’s a certain look and feel, do you really want to push away money because you didn’t have full control of your clients desires?
We’re a service oriented business, just because someone wants a website and has a good idea on exactly what they want, doesn’t make them the ‘evil client’, doesn’t make them any less worthy of proper service and respect.
The web-design community is spoiled, that’s the biggest problem I see.
Hey, when I have to listen to people share their aesthetic opinions as if they were objective facts, why can’t I retreat to my bastion of intellectual superiority? :)
I agree that the desire to belittle the newcomers to web technology is driven by the fear of being misunderstood … which does happen. However, I’m slowly learning to take responsibility for both sides of the communication. It’s my job to be sure I’m understood. And, it’s not easy.
Interesting. I understand what you’re saying and to some extend agree with you. But not completely.
It’s easy to take your own position and understanding of something for granted and become frustrated when the client doesn’t understand. I’m always reminding myself of this fact. However, this can become a fine line: by bringing it down to such a simple level thus ensuring they understand, you risk insulting their intelligence, and obviously assuming they understand when in fact they don’t can make them feel silly and make you come across as arrogant or condescending.
However there are plenty of instances when it’s our job to point out their bad choices – after all, that’s why they came to us – we’re the specialists, and they’re after people with experience. Just the same way I may go to an accountant or mortgage broker. But I believe, more often than not, this can be done in a way that makes them see that there is a better alternative.
Sometimes though you just have clients who are difficult to deal with and/or clueless. For example, I update a site which I didn’t design and nor will I put my name to. The client emailed today asking why the counter had been removed and could I put it back. Immediately following that sentence, they asked if I could make it so the site played music as soon as someone arrived at it – 2 of my pet hates – call it design snobbery if you will, but c’mon – a counter! Really? Are we back in the 90s? Anyway, in this instance I will do as they ask and not waste my time trying to convince them otherwise. I’ve tried before and it fell on deaf ears, plus there’s no connection back to my business to taint it. They’re nice people, so fine, no biggy. But I’ve had a previous client that was an utter ballache to deal with – always changing her mind, trying to bleed as much out of me as she could, and constantly haggling on the price. Not to mention sending through changes which lacked the presence of ANY punctuation – no full stops, commas, capitalised letters – nothing! You try and work your way through that and not get frustrated. In the end I told her to go elsewhere for her web development as I wasn’t prepared to put up with her nonsense. I think this is an important point: we don’t always have to bend over backwards for our clients if they really start taking the pi$$. It’s ok to let people go. I believe in working with people I like and get on with – it creates synergy which the client usually benefits from.
As for the questions you listed above, I disagree with you about asking people to retweet your messages. It’s not that there’s anything majorly wrong with it – but in the ’self brand’ culture we live in at the moment everyone busy pushing their own agenda. They wants their blog pushed, site linked to, tweets rewtweeted etc. So if we all started doing this all the time it would get massively annoying. I think it can come across as a bit desperate. If your constantly churning out good quality stuff then people will naturally retweet it, and you’ve got nothing to worry about.
I also like what you put about the ‘cool kid’ mentality but I want to call a client and tell them how dumb they are! ;)
All the best.
Excellent post Paul. Thanks for saying so many things that I’ve been observing.
Can I thank those who have disagreed with me in the comments so far.
I realise that this post is a tough read in places but instead of going off the handle, you have posted some excellent well considered responses.
Its good to see such quality debate. Bravo!
If you ever do feel superior to your clients compare your paycheck with theirs – it certainly works for me ;)
Personally, I think the work of a web professional is as complex as any other. At some point professionalism in our industry will be essential and therefore assumed. At that stage clients will assume we’re professional just as they assume their Doctor is professional or their Accountant. Until then either focus your energy on proving your worth or have a rant about clients behind their back. Neither hurts anyone at the end of the day.
I don’t think we should feel bad about being frustrated by clients now and then. Blame it on the growth industry and don’t let it shake your professionalism.
That was a really good post. Also thank you for the comment on .NET some of us do have to hold down a full time job and can not survive on freelance work yet. PHP/Opensource(good for freelancing) ASP.NET/Proprietary(Mostly used in large companies and the Government) hmmm maybe that’s why he codes in .Net
Well said. Excellent article. Thank you for that. Very good reminder for us to remember that we are human and the real value we offer to others is being human and providing our human value to other humans.
One comment though:
“We need to understand what the general populace are embracing and go with that, even if it means still supporting IE6.”
I would perhaps reword that to be:
“We need to understand what the general populace are embracing and go with that, or gently lead them to better alternatives so that we do not need to continue supporting IE6.”
IE6 is shunned by designers and developers for very good reasons which are not all entirely based on opinion.
Thanks again for a great post.
That was a really good post. Also thank you for the comment on .NET some of us do have to hold down a full time job and can not survive on freelance work yet. PHP/Opensource(good for freelancing and smaller firms) ASP.NET/Proprietary(Mostly used in large companies and the Government) hmmm maybe that’s why he codes in .Net
I agree in some extend with you Paul but I can see many people saying we are payed to do a service as it is and I don’t agree with that.
We are payed to do our job but, in that job it’s included all our expertise in knowing what others like to see, how to balance webpages, what content must be in the front page in order to atract more people to we site.
So when some of you say that we are pixel pushers because the client is paying is just turning all our expertise away and all our years in trying to learn about marketing and all other stuff.
I am not snob and i like to work the solution with the client, but being just a person who does what the client want, is just providing a bad service to the client, to the client costumers and in the end to all the webdesign community that tries to push this level up while others try to push it down.
A nice touch of reality, but on your first point I think you missed the real reason we are disdainful about clients. It is that we are often hired to be an expert, and then treated as a lackey with access to Photoshop.
True, we as a community can have a bad attitude and have higher opinions of ourselves, but at the same time all the blame does not rest on our shoulders. A website is a two-way relationship between client and designer – and often both have bad attitudes in regards to each other.
Mauro,
I may not have got the point across I intended, while I agree that people pay for the expertise, and indeed clients should be steered clear of common mistakes and towards better solutions…without a doubt some clients just flat out won’t care.
Some of my favorite clients that I’ve ever dealt with, professionally and as individuals, we’re also the hardest to design for and the end product would never be something I’d put on my portfolio. They were still very successful people, professionally and personally, and I admire they’re clear sense of direction and ambition.
Now on the other side, there are very real times where you have to fire a client, but normally you can fire a client in a very professional way.
Also, print shops have by far some of the roughest, most demanding customers I’ve ever seen, I’m glad to be on this medium now for sure!
A few comments
My attitude towards clients is bad because I have some bad clients. Some clients delay payment, some clients delay signing off, some clients disappear for a week. These things annoy me as they would annoy anyone else.
I also have some great clients, these clients I cannot speak highly of enough, they pay on time, they allow some creative freedom and they are a joy to work with.
I do have some negative things to say about my clients, however these negative things are true, they are terrible clients and whether they realise it or not they make my life harder.. no matter what industry you are in, such clients would annoy and negative things would be said about them. This isn’t a web design thing, this happens in every industry. Bad client = band comments.
Regarding snobbery, in my circles it is not as rife as you seem to think it is. Sure people in my circle push towards web standards, semantic mark up, accessible design and secure development. What is wrong with that? What bugs me is people who call themselves web designers yet constantly turn out crap work. Their sites do not validate, are insecure and often I am called in to clean up. These people should be lambasted but that shouldn’t make me a snob.
There is also nothing wrong with getting annoyed at people asking me to retweet. If I think think it is good I will retweet it anyway. Asking me to send my friends what you want is annoying… I will retweet what I feel is relevant. People follow me because they want to hear what I am doing… They don’t follow me so I can retweet stuff that they won’t appreciate.
Top x lists annoy me but it certainly isn’t because I feel it devalues the industry or because I am intellectually superior. I like to read articles like this, well written and well structured. With many blogs now paying for posts authors need to churn them out quickly. Thus they resort to Top 10 lists. In these lists, usually half are things put in to make up the numbers. While the lists are created to be helpful they often are not presented in a way which will maximize their impact. Most lists are not new or insightful, they are just a rehash of something done elsewhere. Just another post by an inspired author to earn a few $$$. Its just annoying. There are some good top 10 lists, I have enjoyed your harsh truths series very much. However surely even you have to admit that there are far more irrelevant or bad top10 lists than there are good.
Finally I don’t really know what you are talking about with the exclusivity. I like it when the general public catches up. People come up to me and talk to me about a conversation I had with them a year earlier talking about a website or service. Its just nice for friends to actually understand and appreciate what I do for a living.
Good post. These and other kinds of negative behaviors are described as “intellectual bullying” in “The Inmates Are Running The Asylum” by Alan Cooper. I address this kind of thing in a blog post of my own elsewhere:
Cooper (101-104) compares and contrasts the physical/athletic jock and the mental/intellectual jock, both of whom exhibit immature bullying behavior.
The athlete bully, with great physical prowess, begins with the idea that “If I can beat you in a physical contest, then I am your master and I am better than you,” but eventually is conditioned to accept that physical domination is not socially acceptable. He grows up when he realizes he can’t get along with other adults by bullying them.
The intellectual bully, with great mental prowess, begins with the idea that “If I can beat you in a mental contest, then I am your master and I am better than you.” However, the intellectual bully rarely learns that mental domination is similarly unacceptable in civil, adult discourse. “There is no maturation process to temper their exercise of that power.” (Cooper, 104)
– http://paul-m-jones.com/?p=381
Paul, great post, I love how you’re not afraid to address problems within our own industry instead of just casting blame to everyone else. Regardless of wrong or right, it’s a really good idea to have posts like this, that get us discussing and reflecting on how we can improve the industry. Many of us are freelancers or running our own design firms, so topics like this and customer service in general are just as important as discussing the latest and greatest CSS techniques. In an economic climate like this, we really need to step up our game on the customer service front and so, thanks for bringing these topics up.
I myself am a freelance web developer not a designer, but we are also guilty of the same things. I think people who are so immersed in technology tend to be smug and impatient with anyone who’s not up to speed, not just clients. I know that I myself am accused (rightly) of it, when say my Mum asks me to explain something about the internet. So maybe we need to address our attitudes towards technology on the whole. It may be the be all and end all of our lives, but it’s not the case for everyone. Like you Paul, I am saying this more as a warning to myself. Attitudes like this isolate people, be they clients, friends, family, etc. Do we really want to be doing that?
Another thing we need to remember is that some clients are really great. I have some clients that I thank my lucky stars for everyday. Not only are allowing me to make a living (something that not everyone has the luxury of nowadays), but many clients go out of their way to follow design/development procedures well, and to try make our jobs easier. Do you find yourself everyday going out of your way to help your client and their work? I know I don’t, so we should really appreciate those clients that do.
Keep the good posts coming Paul!
Very sobering, Paul.
Graphic designers have always been cliquey elitists, but something about the alternate universe web designers have recently populated via twitter et al leads to a ‘man in the high tower’ situation where it effectively becomes very hard to get our heads out of our arses – especially when a lot of people we respect are in there with us :)
BTW, typo:
“…the client doesn’t instinctively know, understand and except everything we suggest.”
Actually, the fact that clients ‘except’ everything I suggest is one of my main gripes. I wish they’d accept them more ;)
Just to jump on the .NET argument briefly – I’m a .NET developer and I think its a good platform, just with a bad rep because of the crap M$ has pushed out in the past. Things are changing and the platform is more than capable of producing quality websites the same as PHP/RoR/django/whateverthecoolkidsareusingthesedays. Grow up.
Some of this I’ve been talking about already with colleagues, and some of it hit me right between the eyes. The parts which echo what I’ve been saying lately make me feel less lonely about it, and the parts that hit me between the eyes were things I really needed to hear. Thanks for this.
I know, and I realized that I was doing that a long time back and I stopped and feels great to know other people, clients, fellow web developers and other wise.
Do you know me somehow? – you have just (I am ashamed to say) described my outlook on my professional life – It is something I am going to change ASAP – Starting with my current clients – Thank you!!
I love this: “At the end of the day we are just building websites”
I think that sums it up.
I am a web developer myself and I do design as well -altough this started as a personal hobby and it turned out clients digged my designs-, and coming from the technical background and being very humble about the design part in which I have no formal background or education, I do notice how rude designers can be. I often try to showcase what I do to people who actually studied design related careers to try to learn from them, but they have this arrogant attitude that I hate. Dont get me wrong, coders we do it as well.
I have awesome clients. Clients who do PR for me more than I could ever do myself. Clients who know me very well and whom I know very well too, who talk to me on a regular basis even when we are not sharing a project because they are nice people and think I am nice too.
And you know what? Let’s get real…what we do is cool and practical and a lot of times it helps businesses, but they are just freaking websites, it is not like we cure cancer or sth.
There’s a joke in the office about me being a “moody designer”, and have been accused of upholding all the stereotypes (the fact that I’m a girl amongst all males really doesn’t help either!).
I’m not defending that, BUT in every industry you get bad clients. Paul, you’ve done some good work educating designers on processes for getting clients on your side, and for that I’m very grateful (and believe it should be taught at every design college… start young!), but at the end of the day, a percentage of clients will still be crappy. There are some real horror story cases, non-payers etc. In those cases, we SHOULD demand that they shape up rather than rolling over.
I think you hit the nail on the head Paul. I’m trying to keep disciplined about this, but occasionally fall off the horse…
I’ve noticed is that the more I do things *WITH* the client, instead of *FOR* the client, the more they appreciate my point of view. Seems backwards, but the more you separate yourself yourself from the client with credentials, skills, and language(jargon), the more they’re just going to tell you what to do. I think it’s harder to relate and easier to tell someone what to do than to investigate an idea with someone who doesn’t like, or feel they deserve, being challenged.
Another giant issue is that designers seem to put the cart before the horse with their recommendations. If someone doesn’t have the context or understanding of how a choice will impact them, no matter how expert the advice is, it’s probably not going to sink in. Designers jump in and tell people how it should be. That clashes with the context and understanding of the client, but no-one bothers to orient people to be able to make the proper choices… It just gets adversarial and personal (“Are you saying I’m wrong?!?!”).
I think those are two of the bigger friction-points with your ideas here. Great post!
Good post, WE all need to step back from time to time and realise we are just in a service industry delivering for the bottom line. The client and their needs. Please people check your ego in at the door.
Yes I agree. Although as people have mentioned in their comments/essays/treatise above their is a considerable lack of respect for web professionals out their.
Unfortunately, many clients do believe THEY know best, viewing us as mere pixel pushers (comments such as “make the navigation brown” spring to mind).
There is a general need for society to recognise that web professionals are exactly that: professionals. We aren’t geeky kids sitting in our bedrooms tinkering away, we are on the cutting edge of modern technology.
Personally I think this stems from the fact that web design is easy to learn and anyone with a decent knowledge of computers can put up a simple website using Dreamweaver.
That’s my 10 pence worth….
PS: I do recognise the difference between “their” and “there”. Just didn’t check before I posted my comment :(