

Ask HN: How do you deal with clients who keep second guessing your decisions? - rartichoke

I&#x27;m sure you&#x27;ve all encountered it but I haven&#x27;t figured out how to overcome it yet even with years of freelance experience.<p>Let&#x27;s say you have a client who wants a fairly basic &quot;this is my business page&quot;, so you throw together a typical 10 page site and show them. They come back with &quot;the page needs more pop&quot;, &quot;make this word 4x larger&quot; or &quot;make these images twice as tall&quot;. These clients tend to have no idea how the internet works and have no experience with design or user experience decision making.<p>It gets under my skin because this type of behavior doesn&#x27;t really exist in other trade industries. If you stood over your mechanic&#x27;s shoulder and told him to use a different tool or stop everything he&#x27;s doing to do it your way instead of his way he would probably punch you in the mouth yet this happens all the time with web development.<p>I understand that everyone thinks they have &quot;the eye&quot; and they want to somehow take credit for the site in some weird way. Usually these types of clients are the ones who will start blaming you if their site doesn&#x27;t succeed too because they don&#x27;t understand how the internet works and pretty much ignore all of the advice you give them.<p>Am I just unlucky to get these clients often or is it the norm? How do you deal with them? They are my biggest complaint with freelance work and honestly it&#x27;s bad enough to me that it saps my will to work.<p>I also want to throw in that just giving into them because &quot;the client is always right&quot; isn&#x27;t always a reasonable choice to make. Sometimes their decisions are really bad, so bad that I would no longer want to be associated with making the site. I would feel ashamed to have it in my portfolio.
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jf22
I've dealt with this for 12 years now.

Throw away your idealism and artistic ego.

You aren't getting paid because you are some grand wizard of digital design
and your vision matters.

You're getting paid because you solve that "don't have a website" problem for
the client.

>so bad that I would no longer want to be associated with making the site

Get over it man. Potential clients don't care as much as you think. They just
want to see you get work done for a good price.

~~~
rartichoke
I really don't have an ego. I think you under estimate the stuff I've
encountered.

I've had people who barely know how to use an e-mail client somehow find links
to adobe after effects filter sites and ask me to "drop in" a random after
effect as their web page logo.

Then they send me multiple back/forth e-mails saying it only costs $29.99 for
the filter so I should do it for $29.99 because all I have to do is [exact
words] "copy paste the template logo into the web site" until I finally I call
them and spend 15 minutes explaining everything and finally they say "oh,
never mind then".

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mkautzm
I don't work in design. I do a combination of software development (and often
get UI design input from my colleagues) and sys and network administration,
but while I'm not good at handling situations like this, the owner of our
company is exceptionally good at it, and I've taken notes as to how he deals
with.

He always seems to be in absolute control of the conversation. If somebody
wants something done, he'll always be totally honest with them, in a very
direct way. So, if someone says, "Instead of buying _recommended UTM_ , I'd
like to just use _free Antivirus program that 's not fit for business use_",
he doesn't let it just go, he'll say something like, "That isn't a complete
solution and it's going to end up costing you in malware removal time and
headaches. You really should just use this product as it will save you money
and time in the long run. I can get you a quote on it before the day is over."

He totally owns the conversation and directs and redirects it to a central
point. In this case, that point is 'Free AV is not a good solution for
businesses that have hardware in house. You need a UTM of some kind." It's
never, 'I recommend..." or "I think you should...", it's always, "This is how
it is in the real world. You aren't hiring me to softball in suggestions, you
are hiring me to be an expert." He addresses their motivations, in this case,
cost and benefit of a proper solution.

For design, I'd imagine it'd be very similiar. Something on the lines of,
"Comic Sans is an unprofessional font. It does the face of your company a huge
disservice and should be avoided."

I honestly suck at it and I'm trying to get better and owning and directing
conversations with customers -- The advice he gives me is go into a
conversation with a purpose and a direction. Redirect the conversation to the
original purpose when you need to ("We can talk about _other thing_ , but
first, I really want to get this product/website/solution in your hands before
we address that. What do we need to do to make that happen."), and finally,
slow the conversation down enough to really hear what they are saying and
understand their motivations and then respond accordingly. It's really easy to
let a conversation run away from you and you end up following a mental script
instead of actually responding to a customer.

~~~
borplk
My problem with the method you have described is that it gets much harder when
the client pushes further after you suggest something else.

"We'd like to just use the free AV"

"Free AV is not a good solution...."

"Yeah...I see...but we'd like to just use the free AV"

"....?"

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runawaybottle
I'm a dev, but I've got good design instincts and build UI prototypes often.

Many people that make suggestions with respect to design often cannot
visualize/imagine what they are actually suggesting. I recall once a product
person wanted to make something "pop" on a site by changing the color of a
button to yellow (blue background). The person had the best intentions and
even picked out the exact hex-color. I googled the hexcode, and very quickly
felt it was the wrong color as soon as I saw it. Yellow works with blue, but
the yellow he picked out was too bright and neonish. This was easy for me to
visualize quickly and dismiss the idea.

The product person either could not envision what he was proposing, or lacked
the instincts to dissuade him on the choice. Therein lies the dilemma, and the
only real solution is to design both ideas and hope good taste wins out. I
suggested a more orange, pastel-like color that worked out far better.

This is a simple example, but I've commonly encountered many people in web
development who are unaware of their lack of design sense. If you suspect that
is the case with someone you are dealing with, the only thing you can really
do is visualize it for them. Quickly hack out their idea, and present it along
with your own mocks/prototypes. Don't just mock their idea and then say
"there, you see, it's not so good", because they may not even have the
baseline taste to judge that. Steve Job's said something that I think
adequately captures the situation, "people don't know what they want until you
show it to them". They may realize they want what you originally gave them
after all is said and done.

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true_religion
I think its best to not only say "i don't recommend it' but to also give a
business reason for why you don't.

For instance, if the only thing it does is throw off the aesthetics off the
page, you could say add "and if the aesthetics are poor, people will not see
your site as that belonging to a serious business".

If you bring it back to the business-aspect people are more liable to listen
to your expertise, as opposed to having it just be an artistic claim.

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psyklic
I've been freelancing for a while. Here are a few ideas:

(1) For every flat rate project, you need a way to counter endless lists of
revisions. I recommend your contract either having a cap on the maximum hours
spent, or having an "n rounds of revisions" provision.

(2) Only accept contracts from clients who are not emotionally attached to the
project or to the money.

(3) Charge higher rates. In general, clients willing to pay more per hour tend
to respect your time and work more.

(4) Change your pitch to make your client realize that hourly/daily/weekly
rates are better for him, rather than flat prices. This is often easier than
you might think. Flat rates tend to be more expensive (worst-case scenarios).
And, pay-as-you-go is a LOT more flexible for your client than flat rates in
terms of scope, etc.

(5) If a project is not spec'd out in detail, insist on your client hiring you
first to draft a detailed spec. You can use an appeal to authority, saying
that you make high-quality products and this is the standard procedure for
making high-quality work. Not only that, it ensures that you and your client
are on the same page from the very beginning, and makes him think through the
project in detail.

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gesman
You're second guessing yours. Client just follows you. Break the cycle by
sending client the [reasonable] bill for services rendered so far.

If he'll pay - he's yours.

If he won't - he never was.

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GABaracus
The Oatmeal has you covered. You can even buy the poster!

[http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell](http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell)

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jf22
Oh and the mechanics analogy is dumb.

There is one way to change a break pad and potentially infinite ways to create
a website.

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borplk
I really like the mechanic analogy. Why do you think this difference exists?

~~~
rartichoke
Their mental image of a mechanic is some person laying on their back under
your car doing work. They can mentally see him doing some form of work even if
it's not the truth.

Their mental image of a web developer is some dude sitting down in front of a
computer pressing buttons and then their site just works.

