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Why Agencies Lead With Design | And Why It’s a Bad Idea

Posted December 26th, 2011 by Nick Benson: [do you have something to share ?]

If you speak to any agency about their latest website project, be prepared to hear some horror stories. At the very least, an emphatic “we will defiantly think twice about another project like that.” I say this because agencies have a hard time figuring out how to build client sites without losing some combination of their reputation, cash flow, and sanity. It doesn’t have to be this way !

From my experience, agencies tend to lead with design – everything else is secondary. Creating a great website for your client does not rest solely on good design or technology. The key is to follow a clear process. The main problem we all encounter when approaching a web development project is that a commonsense approach to web development doesn’t work. A good example of this is the way most agencies begin the process of building a website.

When approaching web projects, agencies tend to lead with design. That initial client meeting – even in the discovery phase – normally goes along the lines of; “Hello Client, welcome to the future of your website! Please don’t pay attention to the navigation we’ve got in there as a place holder, and that tagline and this content are just some things we’re batting around in the back room, so disregard those as well. Anyway, we wanted to get some designs in front of you to get things started. So…what do you think?”

…if your goal is to baffle your client so completely that they couldn’t possibly give you anything resembling accurate and constructive feedback, then congratulations!

If this sounds familiar, and your goal is to baffle your client so completely that they couldn’t possibly give you anything resembling accurate and constructive feedback, then congratulations–you’re on the road to success! Agencies complain all the time that their web projects fail because their clients can’t make up their minds about anything and are continually contradicting themselves. These agencies aren’t delusional; their clients really are giving them lousy feedback. But it isn’t the client’s fault, it’s yours.

Your client hires you because they can’t build the website themselves. They need you to expertly guide them through the very difficult and unintuitive web development process. As a guide, it is your responsibility to never give your clients more than they can handle. You should always be putting them in situations in which they can succeed. They will only be successful if they can give accurate and timely feedback, so the onus is on you to make sure you are never showing them more than they can comprehend and respond to in a single sitting.

The client in the above scenario will not be able to ignore the navigation, text, and tagline–it’s just not in their nature. It doesn’t matter how often or emphatically you tell them to look here and not there–they’re going to look everywhere. When you lead with design, clients are going to instinctively look at everything but the design elements. “Is that what our main navigation buttons should be?”, “Do we really want a picture of Herb on the homepage?”, and “Where’s the mission statement we just spent the past ten months writing?” are examples of things that are racing through your client’s head when you overwhelm them with a design-first approach to web development. They get so overwhelmed and anxious that often times they simply shut down, and end up offering unhelpful feedback such as, “I don’t like blue.”

Hear from you:

We would love to hear from you on this topic. Do you think Agencies need to take a better look at their website projects? Or as an Agency, how do you normally deal with these kinds of projects?

Posted in Design Ideas Productivity Web Development
Tags Design stuff