Teaching to Trust
November 14th, 2006
I just read a lovely article over at A List Apart about the lessons we can learn from dealing with difficult clients. In my experience, clients are difficult because they don’t understand the design process and are a little bit wary of the “magic” I use to make their sites happen. Not only that, but because they aren’t designers themselves, they don’t really understand that there is a theory and a philosophy that directs how I design—I don’t just make things look pretty. I often find myself in very deliberate conversations where I explain to clients that design is not decoration; design has philosophy, structure, usability/functionality, and a message that it communicates. Each element in a design has a purpose, and the pieces work together, from placement of divs to colors to typography, to form a narrative.
What I’m really doing is educating my client about my craft. And the reason I do this is because I have found that the best way to deal with difficult clients is to encourage them to trust me. My motto is, “Teach them to trust”—I teach them in order to gain their trust. And once I have their trust, they rarely micromanage me.
In truth, most clients don’t want to micromanage. They hired me because they liked my eye, or they heard good things about me, or because they liked my approach to design. But most of my clients are concerned about their websites reflecting their personality, and because they want to be represented a certain way, they tend to butt in more than I’d like. It’s completely understandable—the website is the first face so many people will see. It really should make a clear, bold statement about them, their product, or their company. So when my client emails me fourteen times a day about the colors of the navigation bar, I know he’s not trying to drive me crazy, and he’s really not even being a control freak. He’s insecure because he doesn’t understand my rhyme and reason; he just wants to make sure that I understand him and his needs.
Once I realized that clients really want to be able to trust me to give them what they needed, I started thinking about how to gain that trust. Part of me didn’t feel like I needed to earn their trust—if they didn’t trust me, why did they hire me? But the reality is that most clients need and want a basic design education in order to feel powerful in the relationship. Nobody wants to feel powerless. As a designer and temporary educator, my job is to help my clients retain their power by teaching them about what I’m doing for them. They don’t want to hear design jargon. They don’t want to be talked down to. They don’t want to hear about accessibility or standards.
But they will listen to me speak intelligently and on-the-level about color theory, which helps take some of the “magic” (or arbitrariness, depending on the client) away from what I do. They realize that the colors I chose aren’t purely an aesthetic choice; they have emotional connotations and inspire reactions.
They will listen to me discuss art direction. When I explain to a client that I chose to use certain visual elements in order to evoke a certain emotion or to further the narrative, they respond to that. Everyone loves a good storyteller, and when I show them how a good design and good art direction tells a story, and when I further explain what the story is I want to tell, they smile and give me the go ahead.
Every client is different, of course. Some are amenable to listening to my explanations of line length and legibility; some aren’t. Some are interested in decreasing load times and some aren’t. I change my narrative and the points I teach my clients depending on their personalities and their needs. But I am always respectful, and I always ask questions. My “teaching sessions” are always interactive, and I usually learn as much about my client’s desires and hopes as they do about my design process, and we both leave our engagement more fully satisfied. I give my clients as much theory and philosophy as they can stand, and, gratified by their newly acquired knowledge and therefore power, they give me much greater leeway in my work.