When The Client Expects You To Be A Psychic
“I’ll know what I like when I see it.”
“You’re the designer, you tell me.”
These are the common phrases you will hear from your clients if you are a designer. Unless you can read your client’s mind (which is usually jumbled thoughts), you could go on designing forever until the client accuses you of being a bad designer. You are not alone, we, as a local web design firm, faced the same issues too.
Most of the time, the client does not know how to convey better to the designer or he or she just wants to make you go through hell to earn his or her money.
Here’s what you should do if you face such clients:
Gather All The Information
You need to gather as much information as possible from the client and if possible, provide a few examples to illustrate their points. You can do so by asking what the clients like and to show example websites. Then present those example websites and dissect them to see which part does he or she like.
When the client mentioned words like “WOW factor”, “pops”, sophisticated” or”mclwoudkfs”, be sure to ask exactly what he or she meant by those words as everyone has a different interpretation to those terms. Use clear, simple language instead.
Get To The Bottom
This is most likely the worse feeling for the designers if your client rejects your mockups. However, you need to keep asking why. Go through the requirements again and explain to them that all their points have been taken into consideration. If the client can only say “I’ll know what I like when I see it”, then you can use one of the replies below:
- “I’m afraid I am not able to keep coming out with new mockups by guessing what you like. If you have a picture in your mind, we need to bring it out so we can work on that.”
- “I think the important point here is to achieve your goal of attracting your customers and not you. This may not be what you want, but it is what you need to get more conversions.”
- “At this rate, you will have to keep paying me to provide you with new mockups until you are satisfied. So unless you have a deep pocket to invest on my mockups, I suggest you to go with this mockup or find another designer.”
Most of the time, if the clients keep asking you to come out with new mockups without a clear picture, then obviously, they do not know what they want so they take refuge in instructing the designer to ‘make it pop’.
Ultimately, the goal of a website is to impress the visitors and not the owner and there’s no perfect website out there. It is always a work-in-progress to constantly improve the website.