Transcription

SAM: Okay, we are at the final session, had a good weekend?

So, this last session is Nela Dunato, I hope I pronounced that right, a freelance brand designer and digital strategist come all the way from Croatia, adobe course instructor teaching graphic design, talking about processes to help end design revision hell.  Thank you.  (APPLAUSE).

NELA DUNATO: Thank you for coming, I hope you have all had your coffee, so you won’t fall asleep.  I would like to say that I play on the computer for a living.  What is happening with my presentation?

FROM THE FLOOR: Screen saver!

NELA DUNATO: Sorry about that.  People were talking to me, are you nervous?  No, just I hope no, we have no technical glitches and you know, when you talk about something a lot, then this is what happens, you invite the problem!

Okay, will be doing this entire time.

So.  When I tell people I am a designer usually respond, that sounds so creative and fun.  I love it but there are some parts of the job that are less fun than others, one of them is dealing with client who is butch you are our work.  I am sure you all had that happen more often than you would like to admit.  It happened to me a lot of the times but about a year ago, I had the worst client experience of my entire life.  I had some pretty bad experiences but this one just topped them all.

I won’t tell you the whole story because that would easily take up the entire length of this talk, just a few key details.  The client kept playing designer as I like to call it.  They were like submitting their own suggestions for fonts and logo design and so on.  Despite having no background in design at all.  We had so we had like a tonne of revisions that I was not properly compensated for.  We had a really poor personality fit.  So this made just talking with them such a stressful experience, when I would see their name on the phone, I was like, oh god not again! The reason was, that they kept interrupting me when we were talking, kept talking over me, rambling on and on and on, superparanoid, I am like the transparent person at one point they yelled at me.

I am not very proud to admit that I yelled back and that is not the way I treat my clients, so that was like the sign that you know, that whole thing was a disaster.

Even though the resolve, the final result was good and I was proud of it, I was in the end superdisappointed and most of all I was ashamed because I thought that after all these years after more than a decade of working with clients, that I should know better! That these sorts of things should not be happening to me and that is kind of the point of this story is that no matter how much experience you have you are still vulnerable to having been treated poorly and having all of these poor fit clients if you don’t have a process that protects you from that.

So one of the issues that we have is that we kind of tend to forget that the things we design are not intended for our clients but they are intended for the users of their products.  So, for the end users for someone who is going to be browsing that website.

Our job is to figure out who the users are, how they think?  How they behave?  What they need and find solutions for their problems, whilst also making clients money.  Which is a win-win.  Sadly a lot of designers get swept away with their clients or bosses sense of self-importance that the discussion is often turn to personal preferences and personal taste and likes and dislikes.  Which is not the proper design conversation.

I am, the things I am going to talk about today, they are relevant for most industries, it doesn’t matter whether you are designer or not, but designers they have the specialist privilege, literally anyone with eyes to see and fingers to point with can just tear our work apart.  So that is why I am really, I am emphasising to my colleagues and trying to give you the tips on how you can make your experiences with your clients more pleasurable.  So to speak.

So what happens in these conversations with clients I am not saying that we are always right but there are instances where your work is being scrutinised in detail by people who can tell comic sans from callibre and that is a problem, you give into these clients and get into the discussions about likes and dislikes and personal preferences and ends up crying into a glass of gin, wondering where did it go wrong?

The problem is that it went wrong from the very beginning.  Whose fault is that?  It is our own fault of course.  Which is great.  Because this means that we can also fix it.  There is one symptom of this problem I often see that the way that designers try to fix this problem is by making multiple variations of a design.

So we kind of give people 3 options and say okay, which one do you like best?  We hope that they will kind of pick one and will be done with it and we won’t have anymore revisions but I am guessing you probably know how that it works.  Usually the client says, oh I like the header on this one.  But I like the colours better on that one.  The footer on the third one you know?  Maybe try a combination of those 3.  Then we create a combination and then make 3 variations of that combination and goes on and on and on.  We did not accomplish anything.

So variations in design, they are taken for granted and even taught in design schools and courses, it is just something that designers do.

But, we have to realise that we are not doing ourselves or our clients a favour when offering multiple options.  What we are actually doing, is forcing them to make a decision that they don’t know enough about.

They are paying us because they are not the experts.  They want us to give them a solution; not a buffet of half baked ideas.

Besides, what do you like?  Is the wrong yes to ask in this context, we are not selling T. shirts here.

So we do a lot of mistakes when we dealing with clients, and I am sure we can’t fix all of them but there are 2 I have identified that contribute the most to this design revision hell issue.

The first one of them is that we trade leadership for hope.  We are afraid to lead the process, we just hope that the perfect agreeable, I don’t know, educated client will just fall into our lap and will ride off into the sun set on a unicorn and make beautiful design babies together!

We hope that the client will understand our process and play along nicely without us having to explain anything to them.  That just doesn’t happen you know, clients are aren’t like that, that adore every single thing you do, there as rare as unicorns.  So what we actually need to do is we need to explain how our process works.  How to give the feedback that is in the best interest of the project and its users.

You can’t build your business on hope alone.  The problem is that the clients when they get into a project they have no idea what they have gotten themselves into.  They are looking to you to lead them.  They want you to lead them believe it or not.  You are the person who should be leading them because you know the process from the beginning to the end.

So the problem with clients is that they are afraid.  The fear of the unknown is the worst culprit for clients insecurities and every irritating thing they do you know, calling you in the weird hours of the day, e-mailing you ten times a day, asking like a million questions, giving you suggestions of what you should be doing, everything, they do it because they don’t know what is going on.  They don’t know what lies ahead of them.  They are trying to keep control.

So what you need to do in this phase is you need to build trust with them and calm them down you know, make them feel safe about the decision that they are making.

That is the point.

The way you can do that is through transparency.  So transparency is something you can use to kind of release this fear of the unknown.  Stop trying to hide your methodology to hide your process behind a black box and that is not doing anyone a favour.

So you need to explain your process in detail; what is going on, what will happen?  What do they need to do?  How much involvement is required from them?  What kind of feedback do you need?  Do not think that users, your clients know how to provide good feedback.  Nobody taught them how to provide feedback, they did not go to feedback university.  You are the one has to tell them what feedback is appropriate and necessary.

So, a question for you:  Can you explain your process to someone who is not from your industry?  I hope you can.

Because if you can’t explain it, you probably don’t understand it so well yourself.

So you need to be able to explain your process to someone like on the street, a random person, pick them up and try to explain your process and if you do it, congratulations.

So, how detailed does your process need to be in order to be useful?

I think that at the very minimum, you need to be able to describe the phases in your process.  So divide your process in phases and have a like, like a short explanation of what goes on into each one.

Phases are defined by objectives.  Or in case of a website by deliverables that you send to the client for approval.  So here is just an example of WordPress website design and the phases that, this is my WordPress website design, I am not saying everything should look this way.

We start with phase zero.; the project proposal and contract.  It is labeled zero because before this the client is not a client.  The client becomes a client at the end of this phase, then phase one.

In the first phase, research and planning phase, deliverable of that phase is the website architecture plan and the contents strategy.  This is what informs our later work and later stages and then after that, we have website prototyping and design concept phase where we have website wire frames and the style guide, so the visual part, the colours, the typography and the module designs.

After that in phase 4, no 3, we have the themed development phase where we get create a functional website that is maybe a little bit buggy, not polished or perfect but it works.

Then at the end of the fourth phase we have a polished working website exactly as it should be in the end but on a test server.

At the end of the fifth wave we have the live website that is launched on the clients own domain.

So each of these phases has a deliverable.  Now why does this matter?  How can this help you?

There are many benefits to this.  One of them is that you can tie your payment schedule in instalments relate them directly to deliverables and that is a payment schedule that makes sense.  If you have a project, that lasts for 3, 4, 6 months, a year, then having a payment at front and at the end, it is not very cash flow friendly for your client, so maybe get a little more convenient and logical payment schedule.  Another benefit you can create boundaries around revisions.  So each phase can have a limit on the number of revisions and then when deliverable is approved you don’t go back and change the same deliverable.  You are always going forward never backward, once we decide on the colours and the typography we are not going to change that in the bug testing phase.

Another great benefit is that you can easily plan your project time lines we know how difficult it is to say to our clients how long something is going to last, when you break it down the phases and you see how many weeks each phases is going to take and then see how the calculation is going to be more realistic  — let’s say it that way.

Once you know about your process, when you explain it to your clients you are going to sound like someone who knows what they are doing, which is what we are after here.

So here are some ways of how you can do that.

One of the best ways is to do it via a meeting, either in person or through video, if you can get with the client and in real-time and talk to them, that would be perfect I know that is not possible for everyone but that is the preferred way.

So at first you are not going the info up on them as soon as you meet them.  Let them talk a bit about themselves, about the problem they want to solve then when you realise that you are the person who can help them solve this problem and explain to them how you are going to do that.  So you are going to lead them through your process, through each phase and explain how you can achieve the results that they are after.

Then if you can’t do that or if you want to reinforce your process how it works, you can create a document that can be as shown here a PDF document that I use that has outlines of my process and my business policy, things like working hours, meeting times, what if we cancel the project, how much does the client owe?  So on.

So feedback guy, all of that is inside.  You can do also do that in the form of the website that can be like a private page that you only share to client who is enquire about your work or if you are getting a lot of enquiries put it as a public page, everyone read that before they contact you.  So there are many ways in which you can do that.  Of course, you can also reinforce this message in the proposal.  The proposal is like a neglected ugly duckling, nobody likes writing proposals, boring, takes time.  Some people say we shouldn’t be writing proposals, they have a point but I personally write proposals, they are a great sales tool and a great way to show this transparency, to explain your methodology in detail.

What you have to put in your proposal is how many we visions they get and which revisions are allowed when.  So if we decide on the colours and the typography, we are not going to change it 5 minutes before lunch, so put it all in writing when they accept the proposal, they are accepting the terms.  Of course you have to repeat that again in the contract.  Because the contract is the thing that you are going to look at if there is any miscommunication or issues.

And, if you are a person who likes to do some content marketing, blogging, then your blog is the perfect place where you can also reinforce how your process works especially through case studies.  Case studies are amazing.  Because they show exactly how your process was responsible for the success of a client project.  This is a great argument to the potential client why your process matter because if they want to get the result like that company, they have to get on board with our process, because the process is what guarantees the great results that I want to have.

So you can combine different techniques, you can choose one, two or four ways, I prefer to combine everything because you can never repeat a thing too many times.

So another way that we kind of rely on hope is that we hope that our clients are going to provide all the relevant information that we need for our project and that is not true because the clients don’t know what’s relevant.  You need to extract all the data you need in the very beginning of the project so we don’t have any surprises later, like, oh we have this bunch of content that we didn’t tell you about, now figure out where to put it.  One of them is minimise.  Things like that.

So another way you have to do is collect all the information you can in advance and then you will reduce the need for feedback.  You can do this through interviews or you can do this through things like questionnaires either through an on-line form or a PDF form just ask a bunch of questions, all the details and let the client send you all their content through a sharing service like Dropbox or Google Drive and so on and if they want to change something that’s another project, that’s no longer part of this project.

So of course just this alone will solve a lot of your problems and I recommend you do that but of course even if you start the project on the right foot, there is still some ways in which we can kind of mess up our relationship with our clients and that is that we fail to present our work properly.  Presenting our work is super important.

Now a lot of you if you have been doing this work for years then you all this knowledge in our little finger, we don’t think about this consciously we just do it and that’s amazing it means you’ve integrated this knowledge so well, but the problem is when you are not consciously thinking about something then it’s very difficult to explain to other people how you arrived at a solution and why you think this solution is the best for the client.

So, what we need to do is to use solid arguments when presenting our work to the clients that makes sense to them.  Because they’re not designers, they don’t know what’s beautiful, they don’t understand typography.  We have to use arguments that makes sense to them as business owners.

So try and think about how you are going to do that.

What we usually do is the complete opposite.  I mean I used to do this too so no judgment.  We’d attach the screenshot to in email and send it off and ask what do you think? and this invites so many problems.  So this is not what you want to do.

What you need is to present your solutions in context.  You need to explain how you have got to the solution either by displaying iterations you created or by showcasing some inspiration, ideas, give a little background, explain what’s going on, so give a client a behind the scenes look at what’s going on.

I know that you are professionals and you know what you’re doing but your clients are going to have moments of doubt as they’re working with you.  They won’t tell you that but that what they’re thinking.  So you need to present yourself as a professional every step of the way, not just impress them in the beginning but just keep, keep, keep this professional image through the entire length of the project.

Here are some ways you can do that.  Of course presenting in person either via video or just by being with them in the same room is preferable for a lot of reasons but if you can’t do that it’s not a problem.  But that would be the best.  So, as you are with this client you share your screen with them and while they’re looking at the design you point to certain areas of your design and explain what you did and why you did it.  You explain what’s the benefit to their users and for their business.  So that’s super important.  And that way when they ask you a question you can address it right away and don’t have to email back and forth a million times.

If you can’t do that another way is to create a written explanation through a web page or in this case this is PDF presentation.  I usually do that for logo designs – where you also explain what you did, highlight certain points and don’t just present visuals, explain it in writing.  So the more detail you can provide the better.

Now, you have to be very careful that when your client finally accepts the proposals put it in writing.  So ask them to confirm it via email in writing.  People often forget what they told us and it’s very frustrating when you can’t prove it.  It happened to me.  Sad, sad story.  Don’t want it happening again.

People usually when we talk about this and they’re like oh my God this is so much work, I already work hard and now you ask me to work even harder on presentation.  Well, yeah, your presentation helps you to sell your solution to the client and it’s also a test of your ideas.  If you can’t tell a compelling story about your proposal then maybe it’s just not that good.  And besides, all the time that you invest in this part is going to pay off many times over in design revisions.

Now there are some people that are going to be problematic.  So that’s why you need to be open from the very beginning about how you work.  They’re clients that are used to a dozen revisions and 3 concepts on every round and so on and those people are really difficult to change so you are much better off working with clients who have no prior experience of working with designers and you are going to be the benchmark for the entire design industry for them.

So, I am sure a lot of you who are not using this process are thinking yeah this sounds great but you know what, my clients they would never agree to that.  And I know that because that’s what I have been thinking too.  I’ve been worrying about how my clients are going to react but they actually reacted wonderfully.  They’re all happy with the process that we’re using.  So you will never know how your clients will respond until you try it.  So try it.  You might be surprised.

The reason why clients agree to this is because they have trust in you that you are going to do what you said you were going to do, that you were going to do it well, and the point, how you can develop this trust, is to be confident in your work, in the quality of your work, and to present everything, every single part of your process as a benefit to your users, to your clients actually and to their users.  Why is that?  Because clients care about themselves.  They ask for themselves what’s in it for me?  So you have to tell them how is it that your process is benefiting them.

Now, the confidence part, that’s a tricky part.  We all have like imposture syndrome that we have to deal with but the more confidence you have it’s going to be easier to gracefully and politely keep boundaries with your clients because there are going to be moments where client are going to push those boundaries and try to make you do something that’s against your professional process.

And the part of presenting everything as a benefit, you have to genuinely believe this, that it’s a benefit to the client.  We’re not limiting revisions because we’re real easy and don’t work so hard and want to give them bad design.  No, we’re limiting revisions so everyone can focus on things that give the most impact.  And we want people to use their revision tokens very wisely, not just asking for revisions for revisioning sake.  And want the website to be launched as quickly as possible because the client will then make money sooner.  That’s what we want.  Not to waste time on revisions that are useless and won’t change anything about the project.

So, what you need to do is take – you know people usually when they don’t know what to do, they look to their colleagues and they’re like, oh, that person is doing that, I’m going to do the same thing. But just because people do something, it doesn’t mean it’s good for you.  May be they’re hurting themselves without even knowing it.

So, try to think critically about what other designers are doing and not use it just because everyone else is doing it.

Take the same approach that you would take wit your creative work and apply it to your business.  So, test, iterate, and improve your process regularly, not just once but like every 6 months or every year, think what you can improve. If you are already happy with your clients, with your money, with your professionalism, then you are doing it great.  You don’t need my advice.  You are rocking it.  But if you are not 100 per cent happy with either of those, that means you can change something and this is what I recommend to start with.

Thank you.

{Applause}

SAM: Thank you very much.  Do we have any questions for Nela?  Cool let’s go home!  There is a question here.

FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, thanks very much for that, that was really good.  What happens if after you’ve done the web-site, you’ve designed it and it looks amazing, you are really happy the client is really happy then a few weeks later you go on the home page and they’ve changed the here image for something horrendous.  How do you tackle that?

NELA DUNATO: Yes, well, it didn’t happen to me a month later I didn’t have that exact experience, usually people do that a year later, and at that point I no longer mind, but if it’s something really horrendous I would probably shoot them an email and say do you know what I saw you did a little change on the web-site, do you need some help with picking out visuals that would better suit you know the style of the site?  Because I don’t think this is really portraying your business in the best light and it’s not going along with the brand vision that you have.  You know just kind of – do you need help sort of thing?  Not your web-site sucks now.  Be open-minded about it.  And of course you don’t control the web-site after you have done your work, so if you want to put stuff in your portfolio put the screen shot of the version you did and just remove the link if their web-site changes afterwards.  Thank you.

SAM: Any more questions?  Okay, question here.

FROM THE FLOOR: I have a question when you present your designs or logos or brands whatever you do to the clients, do you use like a template for that of your own creation or do you like try to adjust the form of the presentation for specific project?

NELA DUNATO: That depends.  I have a template that I use for all projects that have this little black strip at the top with my contact info and version date, so on, client name, but I try to add a little twist.  I’ll put like – I don’t know the last page is going to be something that is designed in the style – and I am going to do some spreads that are in this brand of the client so they can kind of imagine what their brand is going to look like so I try to customise it as much as possible but not like too much so I spend like the whole day doing that but usually on the final version of the brand guidelines then I try to make those guidelines use the typography and colours that the client is going to use later.

SAM: Okay question here then a question at the back?

FROM THE FLOOR: Thanks for the talk; it was great.  Can you tell us about the proposal process, how much time do you spend on it and do you transfer that into contracts or how do you tackle that?

NELA DUNATO: Okay great question.  So the proposal process, since I have this process of my own that is kind of the same for all the project – okay I have web-sites and brands and then other custom projects.  So, I have this template for how the project is going to go that I re-use from project to project and then I customise the introduction to the client so I focus on the problems that they’ve told me that they have and then I kind of highlight those issues because I want them to really feel like I heard them, I understand them I know what they want, then I propose a solution.  Of course the solution is always a brand or a web-site, ha!  Convenient!  But I am going to spin it so I use their wording.  Then I’m going to spend at least an hour on the proposal document, sometimes more, like 2 hours, and then I also when the contract, when I need to set up the contract I am going to copy paste stuff from the proposal but not the whole thing so I’m going to focus in the contract on the deliverables, list all the files that I’m going to deliver, list the dates, the pricing, the phases of the project because those are connected to fees if the client decides to back out so if they back out in the first phase they’re paying 25 per cent, if they back out in the second phase they pay 50 per cent so I outline the terms then the schedule, the payment terms and so on.  So a contract is shorter than a proposal.  Proposal is like the whole long story and this is a short story.  Still 4 or 5 pages long.

SAM: Question there yes?

FROM THE FLOOR: It’s all going well and you’ve got this lovely referral from somebody you really like to somebody you then have a contact with and you find that they’re another version of the client from hell that you had about a year ago.  How do you now behave?

NELA DUNATO: Well, you don’t have to take on every referral that you get, so if you have – so are you asking about more the how to deal with the social side of it like you got a referral then you don’t know if your referrals going to get offended because you don’t want to work with them any more?  Or are you talking about dealing with how to gracefully push this client away?

FROM THE FLOOR: I think I’ll make it simple.  Both.  {Laughter}.

NELA DUNATO: Okay yes, so the problem is we feel bad when we say no to people and really you shouldn’t feel bad for saying no.  There are many ways of saying no and you can say no in a way that’s really graceful and respectful.  So for example there are certain projects that I just never work on.  I just refuse to work on that type of project and I will say something like hello, thank you for your interest in my work, I’m very happy to hear that you want to work with me.  Unfortunately, I cannot accept this project at this time.  I’m very selective about the types of projects that I take on and I simply can’t work on this project, but I wish you so much luck in finding you do you signer who is going to be a better fit for you.  Thanks again.  Yes.  Then you also send a thank you email to the referral saying hey thanks for recommending X to me, unfortunately it’s not really the kind of project I’m focusing on, but you know I appreciate it a lot.  So this way they will hopefully send you referrals in the future that will be a better fit.  You know just be positive when refusing people.  The best thing is if you can make the client feel like super appreciated and like they’ll be thankful to you for thanking them so much even though you said no.  I mean it’s kind of being nice but also very not for me.  Just say no more often.  That’s kind of the gist of it.

FROM THE FLOOR: Question I had sometimes when I find out the customer and cannot work together and I get out of the project and say sorry I think it’s not really working and get out.  Do you have something in the contract as well if you ever back out from your side not from the clients side?

NELA DUNATO: Yes.  Yes, so actually there are 2 ways this can go.  One way is if I get sick or for some other reason I can’t finish the project I say okay I give you money back or you can buy out working files so you can continue working with someone else.  The other version is if you breach the contract I’ll give you like a yellow card and if you breach the contract again I can break off the contract and you still owe me the money as if you backed out.  So, if they are not respecting your boundaries, if they’re trying to kind of weasel their way through your contract you can say we’re not having that.  It’s good to explain that in advance and clients ask me, okay so what’s this about, what this about?  And I say, look, if I see that we’re just not seeing eye to eye, then it’s better for everyone to go our separate ways.  Hope that answers your question.

FROM THE FLOOR: What happens – so the next question is going to be connected to what you just talked about.  What happens if you have a working relationship with a client and you are in a phase and in order for you to complete a phase they need to do something but they haven’t done the thing which means that now you are going to miss the deadline that you’ve set and you’ve agreed on.

NELA DUNATO: Oh okay so that is like classic.  Everyone has that one.  So, the way I define deadline is – so, I set a date and I say this is the deadline for if you respect all your commitments on time and you have 2 days to give me feedback and then we’ll be on time.  If you are late with any part of the project the deadline is then pushed back for the same amount of days that you were late.  So essentially I am like this is the deadline if everything is going smoothly we can finish even earlier than that but if you are late the project is going to be late and that’s in the proposal, in the contract it’s not your fault, it’s the clients fault and they need to own this so they can’t chase you around – oh the project is late – yeah because you are late.  And of course if you can kind of let the client do their work before you start working with them, that would be ideal so if they have to create content you say you know what if we start on May 1, your content needs to be done by then, start now.  So you ask them how is your content going?  Are you going to be ready by May 1?  Then a week before how is your content going are you going to be ready by may 1?  Then they realise okay we got to get this going. So, try not to start the project until you have everything you need from them.  That’s I found the best way to keep deadlines.

SAM: Okay I’m really sorry we have run out of time.  Are you on twitter.  Are you okay for people to ask questions?

NELA DUNATO: Of course please come up and ask questions if you have it.  I’ll be happy to answer them.

SAM: It was up there but it disappeared.

{Applause} Okay so thank you all very much.  We’re now doing the closing remarks in track A if everyone wants to make their way over there and that will start in 10 minutes time.  Thank you.