John comes to you with a clear set of business objectives and asks for a quote. What happens next leaves John confused, frustrated and extremely unhappy.

Explain why you are asking about money.

Before giving John his quote you ask a little more about the project. After chatting for a few minutes you ask him about his budget. A fair enough question you think. After all there are so many ways you could approach the project. Without knowing the budget it is impossible to know where to begin.

In your mind, building a website is like building a house. Without knowing the budget you can’t possibly know how many rooms the client can afford or what materials you should use to build.

John on the other hand is instantly suspicious. Why would you want to know his budget? The only reason he can think of is that you want to make sure you don’t under charge when there is more money available. Anyway, he doesn’t really know his budget. How the hell is he supposed to know how much a website costs?

Image credit : Be careful not to come across as money grabbing.

John goes away determined to find a web designer who isn’t trying to screw him over. Fortunately for you all of the other designers he asks also fail to explain why they need to know about his budget and so you manage to win the project anyway.

Justify recommendations in language John can understand.

Once you have won the job you arrange a kickoff meeting to nail down the final specification. However, John is instantly regretting his decison to hire you as his worse fears are confirmed.

In his eyes you are immediately trying to squeeze more money out of him as you waffle on about the importance of usability and accessibility.

John doesn’t care about disabled users. No disabled users use his website anyway!

As for usability, surely it is the job of the web designer to make the website usable. Why do we need expensive usability testing? He is pretty sure usability testing involves expensive things like cameras, usability labs and two way mirrors.

Unfortunately you believe you have explained the issues clearly. You talked about WCAG 2 and mentioned Jacob Neilsen. You are beginning to wonder if John is stupid.

Image credit : Avoid technobabble if you want your clients to understand what you are talking about.

Maybe if you had talked about accessibility in terms of search engine rankings and usability testing as a way to increase conversion then John might have listened. As it is John puts his foot down and refuses to pay for any of these ‘ unnecessary extras’.

Include John in the process.

You go away from the kickoff meeting pleased to have a signed contract. However you have the feeling in the pit of your stomach that this is going to be another one of ‘those’ projects. Nevertheless you pick yourself up and dive into the design process.

Almost immediately you get a phone call from John asking if there is anything for him to see. You explain that it is still early days and that that you are not ready to present. John sounds disappointed but resigned.

A short while later you are ready to present the design to John. You are really pleased with the result. It has taken a lot more time than you budgeted for but it was worth it. The final design is extremely easy to use and will make a great portfolio piece.

Image credit : Stop hiding from your clients. Show them work early and include them in the process.

When John sees the design he is horrified. From his perspective you have entirely missed the point. The design clashes with his offline marketing material and fails to focus on the right selling points. Also he is convinced his suppliers will hate it and although they are not the end user, their opinions matter.

After a tense conference call you go away demoralised but with a compromise that will hopefully make John happy. You wonder in hindsight whether it would have been better to show John some of your initial ideas and sketches. Perhaps you should have produced a wireframe first.

Educate John about design.

After much agonising and compromise you are once again ready to present to John.

John is much happier with the new design and feels it is heading in the right direction. However, he does have some concern. For a start he has to scroll to get to most of the content and yet there is empty whitespace on either side of the design. He tells you to move key content into this wasted space.

Also as he thinks about his young male target audience he realises that the colour scheme is probably too effeminate, so he tells you to change it to blue.

While John is feeling somewhat happier you are feeling crushed. It feels like he is doing your job for you. The string of feedback about moving this and changing the colour of that, feels like it has reduced you to pushing pixels.

By this stage you are sure the client is stupid, and just want the design signed off. At no stage do you stop to ask John why he is requesting these changes. Perhaps if you had understood his thinking then you could have explained concepts like screen resolution or suggested an alternative to corporate blue which is so massively overused on the web.

Image credit : Educate your clients so they make more informed decisions.

Instead you wash your hands of the design and just give John what he wants.

Communicate with John regularly.

Now that the design is complete you turn your attention to the site build. At least John won’t care about your code. Now you can finally do things right.

Its a big job and it takes a lot of time. Even though you put too much time into the design and then washed your hands of it, you have your pride. You are not about to cut corners with the code. After all other web designers might look at it and judge you!

You work damn hard, putting in more work than you probably should do. John even managed to slip some extra functionality in at the scoping phase, which turns out to be a pain in the ass.

John on the other hand is wondering what is going on. He hasn’t heard from you in weeks. Surely the site must be read now? He decides to drop you an email asking how things are progressing. You reply with a short email saying everything is progressing nicely. After all, you never did like project management and you are sure John would prefer you building his site rather than writing him detailed emails.

John receives your email and finds himself becoming increasingly frustrated. What does ‘progressing nicely’ mean? He writes back asking for an expected completion date and you reply with a rough estimate.

The date comes and goes without a word from you. After all it was only an estimate and several complications have delayed things by a few days.

John finally looses his temper and calls you. He has arranged a marketing campaign to coincide with the launch date you and because he hadn’t heard from you he presumed everything was on schedule.

Image credit : Make sure you are communicating with your client regularly.

You try to defend yourself against John by citing the scope creep and unexpected difficulties. However, it is hard to respond when John said ‘all I needed was a weekly email keeping me up-to-date on progress’.

Explain John’s ongoing role.

By this stage the relationship has broken down entirely. You finish the work and the site finally launches. Begrudgingly John pays the invoice after delaying it for as long as possible.

What amazes you the most is that John says he is bitterly disappointed with the final result. How can that be when you gave him exactly what he asked for? This guy isn’t just stupid, he is also a jerk!

Of course John sees things differently. He came to you with a list of business objectives he wanted to achieve and the site failed to meet any of them.

He hoped that he could launch the website, see it meet its objective, and move on to the next project. Instead, after an initial spike in interest the number of users and enquiries fell overtime and the site stagnated.

Image credit : Ensure your client understands the ongoing care his website will need.

What John did not realise is that sites need continue love and support. You cannot build it and then abandon it. John needed to nurture his website by adding new content, engaging with his visitors and having an ongoing plan for development.

If only somebody had told him.

The moral of the story.

It is amazing me how quick we are to judge our clients.

As web designers we communicate and empathise for a living. Our job is to communicate a message to our client’s users. We create usable sites by putting yourselves in the position of the site visitor. This allows us to design around their needs.

Why then do we so often seem incapable of either empathising or communicating with our clients?

Perhaps it is time for us to use the skills we have grown as web designers and apply them to our own customers.