During the build, I remember talking with my mother-in-law, and she had this dream and vision on how she wanted her house to be. She planned it down to the last detail. We were talking about some of her plans, and how the contractors missed some things, or failed to follow the plans for others. To me, this all sounded exactly the same as what I was going through with a website I was working on, except I was the contractor.

It’s rare that I get to actually talk to and hear the dreams from the client’s perspective. Between myself and the client is usually a buffer of Project Managers and Account Managers. So the client ends up becoming this abstract figure. I’m not on the phone calls to hear the client get excited, or to hear the tone they have when they critique something. This information gets filtered through the managers, and the non-essentials get cut. I think as a designer, we need to hear the emotions that are evoked with the designs we make.

I’m not really a client-management kind of person, so here’s the dilemma. I like the fact that there is someone to talk to the client, parse that information and bring it to me to work on. But I don’t like the fact that I miss out on the emotion. It’s almost a double standard I guess.

That’s why when I get those moments, such as hearing my Mother-in-law talk about her perspective with contractors, I grab a hold of them. I think that it helps me as a freelancer, and ultimately as a web designer to remember the perspective of the client. Through this whole experience I realized quite a few things. To name a few:

Building a website is a lot like building a house.

Like crazy similar. The step-by-step processes might be slightly different between the two, but overall it’s a strong metaphor.

• Blueprints = Information Architecture.
• Frame = HTML
• Electricity, Plumbing, Cable/Internet/Phone lines = JavaScript
• Paint, Floor, Finishes = CSS

I’m sure we can sit and make comparisons all day, but I think I’ve made my point. I thought this was valuable to help explain to clients what a website is actually valued at. Sure they can be as expensive as, if not more expensive than houses, but that’s not what I’m driving at. I mean that I have a hard time explaining to clients that it’s not reasonable to re-build facebook for $500 bucks. The metaphor helps me give the client some perspective as well.

The client isn’t dumb, they just don’t know the business.

Helping the client gain perspective is important. The client doesn’t know how to build a website. Chances are they don’t know how the internet even works. Ask them about how their business works, and they’ll be all over that. This also means that some of the things that they want isn’t always the best way to execute. That’s why they’re hiring you: you’re the expert, you should know the best way to make stuff.

Using my handy house metaphor: contractors won’t install electrical outlets in the shower, even if the client thinks its a great idea. They won’t build something that is structurally unsound because it looks cool. There are codes to follow. Tell the client about the “codes” you follow.

Contractors: read the spec.

The specifications that the client writes (or helps to write), are a statement of their expectations. If you don’t read it, you’re not going to understand what the client wants, and you’re going to miss the mark, which in turn is bad for you because you look incompetent. My mother-in-law was telling me about a few instances like this. She wanted a fan/light installed in a room. Instead, the electrician cut 4 holes for pot lights, and installed them instead.

A good way to avoid this mess, is to write the specifications, or to write the specifications with the client, that everyone understands and agrees with. When you write out the expectations, you will naturally have a better understanding. That helps me as a freelancer, and it helps the project along because you’re guiding the process. There are situations where this can’t be avoided, and you have to use specifications written by the client. If that’s the case, maybe take the time and create a “project brief” document based on their specifications, and ask the client to review it to make sure everything is correct. This way, you’ve read their spec, re-iterated it into language you can better understand, and you’re presenting you understanding back to the client. Everyone should at this point understand what’s going on.

Clients: go easy on the micro-details.

Now this one is less of a lesson and more of a plea. Coming from a contractor’s perspective, it’s hard to read a dictionary sized spec and get everything right. People go to school for years studying huge manuals and still won’t get 100% on their final tests. Your expectations are too high.

You are hiring a designer, who is trained and skilled in what they do, and who has a better idea on how to execute your overall vision. You might not know about usability issues, or accessibility issues, or search engine optimization, or that this font won’t be pixel perfect because every monitor/every operating system/every browser renders those fonts differently.

If you did know about all of that, why did you hire someone?

In the end, while this is your website, you are not the user. It’s the designer’s job to speak, and make your website for the user: your clients. And remember, your clients aren’t stupid, they just don’t understand your business. The website that your designer is making is there to help them along.

Open question: what metaphors, or methods do you use to help explain similar concepts to clients?

I was talking with a good friend of mine today; he and I were talking about work and well, complaining I guess. I just recently released an HTML email marketing campaign, and I mentioned that “I feel like I sell my soul to the devil every time I make one of these things.”

He told me that he feels like that every day.

Me: “What do you mean?”

Him: “Well, I lie for a living. I have to lie to all of the people that read these materials that I make, and I have to artfully play with words to hide the truth.

Me: “Oh. I know what you mean: marketing.”

All Hail King Dollar!

My problem with marketing is that its misrepresentation. The general public deep down inside knows this. These companies try to give people warm and fuzzies, but they’re just after their money. They care about the people’s experience and what the customer service was like because they want the people to come back, so they can get more of their money.

I had an other conversation with a different friend on the topic of social structure. We determined (at least as much as us amateur sociologists can) that our society’s structure is still a monarchy, or even theocracy, and nothing has really changed much from the medieval and ancient times. We just have the illusion that things are better. Quite pessimistic, I know.

No we don’t have the Prime Minister as the King, and we certainly don’t worship him. We worship the dollar. The dollar is our King. We still have upper, middle, and peasant classes, except we outsource our peasant class to third world countries.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m new to this world. Or maybe I’m just naive, but I personally like when a company goes one step further than the other guy, and does something that is actually useful to me. Companies have been able to take away some of my so-called freedom just by going a few extra steps, and I don’t mind.

Paradox of Choice

Let me qualify that statement: Apple Computers. I buy Macs all the time now. I’m fully in the cult-of-mac. I argue with my brother regularly over the PC and Mac. In any case, common complaints against Macs: you can’t customize them, you’re restricted on hardware choices, restricted on software choices.

I don’t mind losing that freedom, because the with the choice I do have, the results work very well. For those who know what they’re doing with PC hardware/software, they have the illusion of choice. Yeah they can choose from 100 different graphics cards, but only 3 of them are worth it.

I just want to buy a system that works. Apple has done the heavy lifting on making sure everything is compatible and will run exceptionally well, otherwise they wouldn’t sell it. Apple doesn’t give me a warm and fuzzy feeling. Microsoft tries to give me a warm and fuzzy feeling, but I just get creeped out by them. I don’t want to cuddle with Microsoft.

Path of Least Resistance

I imagine marketing people sitting around looking at new products, or ad campaigns. In my head they’re thinking about this equation: how to I do the least, and get the most? Not a bad equation. I would like to achieve the same thing: it’s called efficiency. The problem occurs when they make a decision about that equation. There’s usually a few roads to choose from: easy or hard (and maybe some in between). More often than not, I see them go down the easy road: they lie.

It’s the path of least resistance. It’s what everybody else is doing. I hope I never get that way.

“…we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” — President John F. Kennedy at Rice University in Houston, Texas on 12 September 1962. via WikiSource

I want to do the hard thing. More often than not, it’s the right thing.

I think my pain is impacted by the fact that I was helping out with my third move for the month of October. My brother moved on the 18th. My wife and I moved into our new place on the 25th, and this past Saturday my brother-in-law moved as well.

The bonus is that I feel like I’ve been excercising, and there’s some ambition to start running again. The downside is the soreness, and overall death-like fatigue I’ve been suffering, accompanied by a child who has trouble sleeping because his pearly whites are tearing through his gums for the first time.

But that’s all that I really have to complain about: thats the worst I can come up with.

I think people like to complain. I know that I love it. It gives people common ground for discussion, and complaining is so embedded in our culture. I think there is a serious line that shouldn’t be crossed where complaining turns into talking bad about someone.

The company I work for has a contact form that was actively being used until we made some major improvements to it. The comments from the contact form were from people who would call us idiots, or worse because obviously we don’t know anything about websites, which at the time and state of the website, I don’t blame them for making that assumption.

When I thought about what their complaint was, it really comes down to one thing: result did not meet expectation. In the end, I’ve been discovering more and more that meeting or beating an expectation is how to keep people happy. Sometimes that’s unreasonable, and so when that’s the case, don’t bother.

The folks at 37Signals have a similar idea where they believe that value must be greater than the price. Web is tricky, because nobody really has a proper sense on what value a website has. I think we (as a web community) are slowly learning though.

It might be an over simplification. I’m still young. I’ve got years to become jaded and skeptical. I’m ok with being wrong.