Frankendesign (Create your own “Obamicon” at http://obamiconme.pastemagazine.com/)
One of the biggest complaints designers have about clients happens during the design review. Inevitably, clients want to mix and match elements from all of the designs they’ve seen into a Frankendesign. Unfortunately, a Frankendesign usually disappoints designers, creates a fractured experience, and short-changes users.
Why do clients do this? And what can designers do to avoid this?
In my experience, clients do this for 2 reasons:
- Clients lack the ability to communicate about design
- Clients want to participate, collaborate, and contribute to the design
And designers allow this for 2 reasons:
- Designers haven’t set expectations for the design review
- Designers don’t have research to back up design decisions
Helping clients communicate about design
Communicating about design is difficult. It can take designers years of schooling and more years of work experience to learn how to do it effectively. So why would we expect our clients – who often have no experience even working with designers – to be able to communicate about design? Mostly, we’ve forgotten how hard it is.
Clients are relying on a very limited design vocabulary and their ability to point at design elements that they can compare and contrast to communicate to us the fuzzy idea they have in their head. That is why they say things like, “Can you make it pop more?” and “can you put those colors in the other design.” Additionally, clients tend to try to solve design problems instead of telling us what the problem is and letting us solve it using our design expertise. It is our challenge to help the client articulate the issue they have with the design so that we can provide a solution.
The best way to do this is to keep asking questions until you get to the heart of the issue and can propose a better solution. For example, if a client says the design needs to pop more, the issue may be that they feel the design lacks interest. Make sure the client feels listened to first and then suggest solutions.
Allowing clients to contribute designs
If clients wish to collaborate on the design, which they usually do, I think it is beneficial to let them do so. Beyond the usual benefits of collaboration (team building, shared ownership, etc.), visual designs are fun. A lot of what we’ve been reviewing with clients before the visual design review is rather mind-numbing and tedious. When we finally show them some pretty pictures, we have their attention. This is something they can easily grasp and enjoy. Let’s let them have some fun.
This doesn’t mean we let them control the designs, rather it means we carefully listen to their feedback and propose solutions in a way that lets them own part of the final design.
Setting expectations for the design review
Before we show any visual designs to the client we need to establish a few things with the them:
- The designs you’ve created are really great and you’re extremely excited to show them. This starts the review off with a positive feeling and gets clients looking at the designs in a positive light.
- We are creating designs for their project based on our understanding of their users. Although we won’t outright say it, it means we are not designing to the client’s personal aesthetics. Many clients think a designer’s job is to pull the design out of their head, this is not the case. So you may need to educate your client about designing for the end user.
- Each design stands alone and has known strengths and weaknesses (i.e. one design targets generation y really well, but not generation x). Mixing the designs will not remedy their weaknesses but will dilute their strengths. This means you need to present each designs strengths and weaknesses.
Backing up our design decisions with research
This may be the hardest part of our job, but backing up our designs with research is the best way to make the right design decisions as well as establish credibility for the design. We often don’t have research to draw from or the time or budget to conduct research. However, there is research out there and I would argue that it would be better to present one design with research-backed decisions than two or three designs based on our best guess. There are ways of quickly conducting research, but that’s another blog post.
Additional sources
Here are a couple of good blog posts and articles about reviewing designs with clients:
http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/design-designers-clients
http://ahussam.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/how-to-sell-your-design-and-get-it-signed-off/
