Client-Centered Services

Change Your Motivation

To help our clients solve their problems, though, we need to understand their problems and see the situation from their perspective. Our clients are people, too. Just as we go to great lengths to get to know a Web site’s users and strive to understand what drives their behavior to help us make informed design decisions, so too, we need to endeavor to discover the motivations underlying our clients’ behavior to help us make informed service decisions.

This is true at all times, but becomes essential to providing good service when a client’s behavior becomes irrational or unreasonable. In such a case, after some probing, it could come to light that they’re still stuck in a business-centric mindset, with their focus on business goals, not the user experience. Or perhaps they’ve got a manager breathing down their neck asking when the Web site will go live because they want to impress some of their overseas stakeholders. Or maybe they’ve got personal issues.

In any case, rather than just trying to figure out how to get what you need from your client—even for the honorable purpose of keeping their project on track—or just agreeing to whatever they say at the expense of the user experience, the client-centered approach endeavors to see things from the client’s perspective, so you can figure out what you could do differently to help them solve their problems.

Be Willing to Reconsider Your Approach

Far and away the easiest way to uncover what’s going through a client’s mind is by having a conversation with them—preferably face to face. Of course, you can’t just ask them, “What’s going on in that head of yours?” Instead, when you seem to have hit a rough patch with your client, you might gently ask some probing questions at your next meeting with them. If you don’t have a meeting scheduled, think of a useful reason to hold one. For example, perhaps you could suggest having a mid-project review meeting to get everyone back on the same page or holding a workshop with the client—and maybe some stakeholders—to answer some questions that have arisen.

Once you’ve discovered what the underlying problem is, you can take action to help to solve it. Sometimes all that is necessary is to help clarify some aspects of the user-centered design process, document your design-decision rationale so they can pass it on to stakeholders, or revisit your user research to further validate the project direction. Whatever it is, your aim should be to help empower your client to resolve their problems.

In dire situations, however, you may even need to rethink your whole approach to the project—within reason. Again drawing a parallel with user-centered design: Although the Web site exists for the sake of users, there are usually some constraints within which you must make design decisions. Of course, there are budget and timeline constraints, but often there are also technical constraints or brand requirements that limit the scope of your options in addressing users’ needs.

Likewise, with client-centered service: Although the project exists for the sake of the client,  there are some constraints within which you must make service decisions. Of course, there are again budget and timeline constraints, but often there are also resource constraints or business strategies that limit the scope of your options. In most cases, however, you can rely on two things:

1. At the end of the day, the client wants their new Web site.
2. They’ve already signed off on a certain budget to make it happen.

This being the case, it can be the path of least resistance to rethink your planned activities to see whether it’s possible to spend the remaining budget in a different way to get to the same desired Web site.

So, with an open mind and an awareness of the project constraints, you can begin recalibrating your approach. Remind yourself of the overarching purpose of the Web site—namely its role in achieving specific business goals—then question each planned activity to judge how useful it would still be in achieving the project goals, given the existing situation. Don’t be afraid to take resources from less useful activities and allocate a larger part of the budget to more useful activities or to entertain the idea that certain standard, user-centered design activities might not be useful at all in this case and that non-standard activities might be more useful. Really exert yourself to look for ways in which you can achieve what’s best for the client.

Empathize for Success

With my last words echoing in your mind, perhaps you’re thinking to yourself: That all sounds very nice, but how do I know that we’re not going to burn through the rest of our budget and end up taking a loss just to deliver a Web site that compromises the user experience? Let me answer your question with another question: Why is it that user-centered design has been so successful?

We know that empathizing with users, seeing a Web site through their eyes, and appreciating their needs is the best way to ensure that a site meets their needs and is intuitive and friendly for them to use. And by extension, a business is more likely to achieve its goal of selling a product, service, resources, or knowledge that ultimately generates income and keeps the business running.

Similarly, we need to realize that empathizing with our client, seeing the project through their eyes, and appreciating their problems is the best way to help solve their problems, ensure the project runs smoothly and efficiently, overcome hurdles, and achieve their business goals. And by extension, your consultancy is more likely to achieve its goals of having happy clients, getting repeat business, and building a great portfolio of work.

Case Study Redux: A Cultural Shift

Going back to the case study that I described earlier: The situation of the organization was that it had such a deeply embedded culture of business units protecting their own slice of the business that our client was stuck. On the one hand, they wanted to pursue user-centered design. On the other hand, not too surprisingly, changing an organization’s culture from one extreme to another may meet strong resistance and, therefore, cannot be achieved overnight.

After a few discussions, we agreed to rearrange the project plan. I was to go ahead and draft an information architecture, prototype a couple of key user journeys, create some low-resolution visual designs, and document my design rationale—all based on my current understanding of their domain and my years of consulting experience. The goal was to use these deliverables as sales tools to convince all of the business stakeholders that the user-centered approach would produce a solution that would be far easier to use, more useful, and therefore, more successful than their current Web site. Subsequently, we planned to proceed with a cut-back version of the project plan, assuming that what I had managed to produce would give us a head start on many of the UX activities.

I had never done anything like this before. Usually, I would advocate that the safest way to undertake a Web site design project would be sequentially collecting business and user requirements, doing a card sort to establish the site’s information architecture, creating a prototype, and testing it with users before beginning any visual design. But in this case, I conceded that the project plan needed to be dynamic—within budget, of course! In the end, the client was happy because, not only were they going to get a beautiful new Web site that would be useful and usable, they would also receive help in finally shifting the culture that had caused so much division within the business. They admitted that, for a number of years, this cultural issue had been an Achilles heel for the business, and try as they might, they hadn’t managed to make much progress in transforming it into the desired culture of collaboration and unity—until now.

Build Client Relationships

By now, you can appreciate that—although a client’s Web site comprises useful content that is presented through a usable user interface—in a deeper way, it is the face of the business. Just as a person’s facial expressions communicate to the outside world what’s happening inside, a Web site reflects the internal state of a business. Therefore, to create a great user experience for a Web site, it may be necessary to help solve a business’s problems by helping to shift its culture. Attempting to do this may seem quite confrontational to your client and stakeholders, so be sensitive in your approach. And remember, even though you may achieve what seems like only a small shift from where you’re standing, it may well be a monumental shift from their point of view.

Everything begins at the kick-off meeting. So, rather than focusing on a UX project’s usual matters—scope definition, project plan, and resourcing—though you must, of course, cover these bases, shift your focus to establishing your relationship with the client. Get to know the people who represent the client—their personalities, their culture, and their personal interests in the project. Perhaps you can even ask them for their preferred way of engaging: Do they prefer weekly, face-to-face meetings or email messages and phone calls; regular reviews of work in progress or presentations of more polished outputs?

Always be sure to take your client—and preferably the other stakeholders, too—on the journey with you. Explain what you’re doing and why, and walk them through the feedback you receive from users as you go. This way, not only will they feel more comfortable with the user-centered design process, you’ll have more opportunities to strengthen your relationship with them, become familiar with the problems they’re facing, and thereby, be able to put into practice the idea of client-centered service.