These Aren’t the Droids You’re Looking For
Persuading clients to buy good design
Jeffrey Zeldman
Happy Cog Studios
Underwear
- The glory days
- Entrance tunnel
- Tomas Muller: Razorfish’s Helsinki office
- Life outside the cubicle
Persuasion
- It’s the relationship, stupid.
- Good clients enable good work.
- “The only way to do great work is to have great clients.”
–Lou Dorfsman, former Creative Director for CBS
The “great client” myth
Endless scope
- One way to sell great work is to never stop working on the same job.
Respect flows both ways
- The client is not an idiot.
- Don’t choose clients who are idiots.
- Choose good clients.
Learn to smell trouble
- Bad assignments pack plenty of paperwork. (Focus. Pitch.)
- Dialog early. Banter and be casual.
- Your emergency is not my problem.
Bad selling: a tale of two agencies
- The bad agency (Evapril)
- The good agency (VH1)
- Bad agency feared client.
- Otherwise good agency had contempt for the client.
- Neither permitted honest interaction with client
Good selling
- Have a process. Be calm and methodical.
- Build the relationship before you show design. (Wireframes are a great tool for building relationships, not just diagramming user flows.)
- Keep reminding the client where you are in the process and what has been agreed to.
- As in any relationship, learn to translate.
“Everybody gets design.”
- “Everybody understands design. ”
— Hillman Curtis
- Your job is to convey the meaning of each design.
Sell ideas, not pixels
The high-class client
Sell ideas, not pixels
The factory
Responding to criticism
- That color is ugly.
- What don’t you like about it? Is there a shade of blue you prefer?
Responding to criticism 2
- That button is too big.
- We were responding to research that showed users don’t know what to do when they get to this page.
Responding to criticism 3
- Dan M. Brown — Communicating Design (New Riders, 2006)
- When all else fails:
- Push back
- We’ll look into it
- Agreement
Zag
- Blue Flavor: The Agency Model is Dead
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“We also don’t do big presentations of deliverables producing three versions and asking the client to pick Door 1, Door 2 or Door 3. Rather we choose to work transparently with the client to mutually build the deliverable over many iterations, graying the line between company and agency.”