Dealing with “addicted” clients
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After working with several different clients from different countries, I’ve learned something very valuable. Each one of them was “addicted” somehow because of past projects, and you have to deal with it to achieve painless results. There is two situations that can happen often when working with this kind of client, (1) project’s beginning – easy to introduce your work process and best practices; (2) in the middle of the project – in my opinion the hardest way to change client’s mind about your work.
The Achilles’ heel
In most cases clients don’t have the proper knowledge about what you’re doing, or how it’s supposed to be done, they only expect good results within the schedule. In other cases, clients give you “opinions” and them expect to be correct about it.
I really think that this button should be in another place, I don’t like where it is and my associates are telling me that we should move it around.
A common phrase from a client.
Even if you have done a research, after meetings and meetings about usability and information flow, you think “How call I explain them why the button cannot be moved around”? Sometimes that isn’t a easy job to do.
Dealing with client’s opinion
In that case, the best thing to do is show clients all your research and notes about how you and your team came up with that result, the button position. If you have an usability test, for example, show them the recorded sessions, the participants opinions and progression, so you can defend your decisions.
Let’s say you don’t have a material to show clients, a good thing to do in this situation is a quick and simple “usability test”. Do a couple tests with them always defending your position. Let the clients feel like a user navigating through the web site and show them possible actions that most of users would do. That way they will noticed how things work in a different point of view.
This is only one of several situations that you can find during work. Defend your opinions with concrete materials and research results. Clients like to see things, not just hear them. Things like visual materials, flows, sketches, videos are great to assist you when defending your ideas.