It’s time to revolutionize the relationship between the designers and clients. If you want your clients to say yes to your designs then bid farewell to the sovereign to servant relationship and welcome with gusto the peer to peer relationship. Fixing this bond is the only way to induce your clients to nod their head for the designs. Most of the time, we treat our clients as royalty and submissively follow their orders. Following commands is not an issue but blindly following them without expressing your point of view is a blunder. By doing this you are killing your strong quality, creativity which is vital to create engaging designs. Remember you have a creative mind and your client has business mind, so if both minds work together, the result will be definitely mind-blowing. It’s a moment of immense celebration and happiness, when the client positively responds to your designs. Your efforts seem to get completely paid off.
So how can you actually make your clients to say willingly yes for your designs?
You need to become an expert:
What’s going to come next? Clients are always inquisitive about this. Hence you need to have a methodology which will make the design process, clear. You need to be yourself confident and develop a sense of confidence among the clients and make them believe that they have made no wrong choice by choosing your company. Information gathering is one of essential aspects which you need to focus on. You need to cover up information like company objective, success criteria, competitive analysis, customer expectations etc. These details will not only enhance your work but it will serve as an important document when you will need to give justification for what you have done. It’s not easy to convince the clients without facts and figures. By doing all this, you will come across your clients as experts.
Say yes to your clients:
If you want to hear yes then say yes. Clients appreciate the designers who positively respond to their suggestions. According to the design experts, always say yes to your clients. They may not be having web knowledge but aspects of their business they surely know better than us. They know who is their targeted audiences, what they want to highlight on their website, their business objectives. We are just going to design the website for them but the clients are going to live with them. Hence it is essential to work along with your clients at all the phases, when required. This will make them feel valued and they will actually have a soft corner for the design as they have contributed in it. There are more likely chances of approving the design.
Explain the client about his role:
Conducting a meeting before the project inception is a must to explain the client the overall design development process. After this you need to explain the client about their role. It is really imperative for the client to know their role for equal participation and favorable outcome. If a client plainly says, they dislike particular element, then it will not work for you. You need to focus on the client’s problem rather than presenting a solution. Persuade the client to be more precise by inducing them to tell why they don’t want that element, so that you can work on it. Let the client just focus on business objective and don’t let them poke their nose in the creativity department for that you are there. Explain to the clients that instead of focusing on their own likes and dislikes, they need to know what the users would like or dislike. Ultimately they are going to use the website.
Manage the feedback:
Everything was running fine until now, but when the time came to take feedback from the client, then the real problem arises. Clients mostly have a habit to show their designs to someone else and take their opinion and in case of big organizations, apart from clients there will be a whole team who will review your design. You make an effort and talk to the person in charge, directly so that they feel wanted and listened. This will create a positive impact on them and may result in acceptance of design. When you start defending for your designs, it creates a negative effect. Every individual will have different opinion, so to avoid the confusion or rejection, deal with each person separately. You present them with the justification that why you have done this or the best option is to prepare a questionnaire. This will certainly help you to manage the kind of feedback you are getting.
The main purpose of any designer is to get the design approved and this can be attained, only when you develop a peer-relationship with your clients.
