To do a good job I need to know the reasoning behind each decision. Sometimes I find myself told to “put this here” or “add this page”, and I don’t know why I’m being told to do these things.
But if I don’t know the reasoning behind decisions, the design will suffer.
Say for example you’re a holiday company, and I am asked to place an image of a boat on a page on the site, beneath a block of text describing your company. As far as I can see, there is no obvious relation between the image and the text. I can only make an educated guess why I’m being asked to make this change, which makes it difficult to be confident that it is the right decision.
But even if the decision is certainly the correct one, the fact is that I don’t know what lies behind it. This makes it difficult to implement.
In the example above, I don’t know how that image is supposed to relate to the text. I can suggest a strong relationship by sizing the image exactly as wide as that block of text, or by making the image smaller and placing it inside the text itself. Or I can suggest a weaker relationship by placing the image a little bit further from the text, by making it wider than the block of text, etc. I have a huge amount of options to choose from.
All I can do is guess… there’s a very good chance I won’t make the best call
But as I don’t really know what the image is doing there, I don’t know what I should do. Without further input, then all I can do is guess. It will look okay, but there’s a very good chance I won’t make the best call.
And without knowing the why, I can’t suggest a better how. There might be a better place for the image, a better image to use or perhaps a compelling case for no image at all.
If your designer is in the dark about the reasons behind these very low-level decisions, you are hobbling them. They are directionless and in the dark, and you are making decisions that they are far more qualified to make (hopefully, anyway… why on Earth would you hire them if they weren’t?).
This leads to sub-standard work, which may cost more than better work if you are being charged for change requests.
Ouch.
When I was in this situation recently, I kept thinking “I’m an experienced designer. They’re not. Why do they think they should be making these decisions?”. This is a valid point, but when I started to write this out I realised that I was only taking my frustrations out on my client. My focus should instead be on assuring that my client gets the best service for their euro, and the best end product, as possible.
So I removed anything which smelled of this from the email, and made sure that it focused on what this behaviour was costing the client (in terms of quality) and gave them a way out.
The process I usually use when designing a website solves a lot of these problems and results in a better end product. As designers, we should have processes and we should certainly know why we do things a particular way. And, if we are dealing with clients then we should have the skills to communicate this in a way they understand.
Take an honest look at the situation. Is it possible that you haven’t informed your client of what to expect? Or when you described your process, did you focus on mentioning deliverables and avoid explaining the purpose behind each stage?
In the most recent situation, the problem arose because of haste: the first stage of the website was due 4 days from the initial meeting. We didn’t really talk about how a site is designed. To solve this problem, I offered to sit down and speak with them about the process I use for web design before we moved onto the second stage of work. They seemed happy with this.
This is an Article. It was posted on February 21, 2008.
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