Excerpted from “Robin Williams Web Design Workshop” (Peachpit Press).
Unless you’re one of those lucky designers doing web development to please yourself, you’ve probably come to the realization that you need to work with clients. The premise seems simple: You design a Web site for someone, he pays you, everyone is happy. But unfortunately, it’s often not that easy. Between those basic steps, plenty of misunderstandings can occur unless you take precautions. You need to establish limits, because your client most certainly will not.
For the most part, Web clients are decent, understanding people. They’ve decided they need a Web site and were smart enough to select you as their designer. But — in your role as a designer and project coordinator — you need to prevent mismatched expectations. It’s common that you will understand the scope of the project to be one thing, while your client believes it is quite another — usually bigger and grander than their budget allows. If you allow this mismatch to continue through the project, you’ll likely have an unpleasant surprise at the end. Your once-happy relationship with your client can deteriorate into a prolonged and unhappy argument.
In the absence of defined parameters, clients usually make assumptions. Something like, “I see my site has only 20 pages — I assumed there would be at least 75!” In situations like this, you will almost always lose time, money, or your temper.
Clients Will Be Subjective
As mentioned before, there are many useful principles of design that, if applied, will help you make the right decisions and end up with a balanced page layout. Still, the process remains a highly subjective undertaking by any measure. The question is always there: “Will the client like it?” Welcome to the one of the great mysteries of the design process — client reaction.
There’s just no way to quantify or anticipate the exact emotional response people will have to any given design. Usually they either like it or they don’t. Or they like some parts of it and despise others. To make matters worse, their dislike may be vague or even irrational. “I don’t know what it is, but I just don’t like it,” your client may say as you feel your blood pressure begin to rise. But before you lose your cool, remember that this is all a typical part of the process to determine the best design solution.
The fact is, clients will always like some things and dislike others. While you have little control over that, you can guide the process to a satisfactory solution. If you find that your client has issues with your proposed design concepts, identify and focus on the things the client does like and try to understand why. You may get some insight about their design preferences. Try to determine if it’s a subjective, personal opinion thing (“I don’t like goats or green neckties”) or if it’s related to external communication (“I’m concerned that our customers won’t understand the photo of the goat in a green necktie”).
The more you discuss the design with your client, the more likely it is that you will learn how to create a solution that will make them happy. However, if you discover that what they really want is undoubtedly the worst idea you’ve ever heard, then you may have to resort to persuasion.
That’s when it comes in handy to be able to express design concepts verbally, as Robin talks about in “The Non-Designer’s Design Book.” If you can’t express in words what makes a particular concept succeed or fail, you and the client will simply have a tug-of-war of “I like it this way” and “Well, I like it that way.” Good luck.
This article was last modified on January 6, 2023
This article was first published on January 21, 2002
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