The Customer May Be Wrong
In business there comes a time when you might look across the table at your client and suddenly realise that what they just said is wrong. Not a little wrong – plain WRONG. But what do you do? How do you react to a statement that the project will include some feature or aspect you know to be wrong?
It depends on the wrongness and the degree to which that wrongness impinges on the way the site will operate, the revenue it might or might not attract, or the legality of providing that wrong. In short you need to be prepared when you walk into the room for that statement of wrongness and be ready to turn a bad thing into an educated reversal in your favour. Its not going to be easy but if you let them walk away with the idea they are not wrong then your battle will be all the harder when you revisit the subject.
In the end your job is probably more about education and development than it is about simply development. The client does not know about browsers, pixels, servers or screenreaders, and probably far less about photosensitive epilepsy or the reasons for users abandoning their shopping cart. Your job is to fill that gap in their understanding and to place yourself as an authority of technical and design expertise.
I’ve had this conversation with a number of people over time and to some degree I agree with most that the constraints of the client holding the money and the demands of being in a ‘service industry’ mean there are often compromises in the project outcomes. An example I can think of is a real estate site which demanded their main navigation be JavaScript based so it looked cool (and there was no graceful degradation to allow access to much of the site for those without JavaScript enabled). The client just insisted. Unfortunately the developers just obliged. Even more unfortunately some people who didn’t know shite from a bucket of popcorn looked at it and said it was pretty so it still won a regional design award. Go figure…
So this is more a post to mull over rather than the-law-according-to-Clark. Just accept beforehand that the customer may well be wrong. And really WRONG. Sometimes so wrong you’ve got to ask yourself if you’re in the right situation.
August 3rd, 2007 at 10:30 pm
Very good point mate!
Everyone in the web industry should be aware that the customer can be wrong (sometimes horribly wrong) and how to proceed accordingly. The harder task is making the customer realise and accept that they’ve got something a bit wrong…and to do that without destroying their ego in the process!
August 4th, 2007 at 4:27 am
Yes I have to admit I’m learning the hard way how to negotiate that one too. But its really a critical part of what we are out to achieve. It gets harder when your client on hearing your input just puts up their hand and says “I don’t want to learn anything, I don’t have time, that’s why I need you!”… so you’re in a client isn’t listening phase. Returns back to a basic communication problem.
In the end they need to realise they hired you for your expertise and trust when you say certain things that you know what you’re talking about.
That being said – sometimes people just don’t listen too. So if it gets to the crunch you might have to think about whether or not you need that job versus your reputation being shot for producing an epileptic eyesore for example.
In the end if you do what they say they might well be on your door after a month past launch asking why they have no customers when the OLD site made them money. Then they could even badmouth you in a word of mouth industry like this and cost you in the long run. So its something that needs careful consideration I guess.
It sounds like you’ve been in the situation too Matt