Touchy subject: Client education
We rant and rave about them, we sigh and shake our heads, we mutter under our breath about their inability to see the bigger picture. But where would we be without them? Serving burgers in McDonald's probably.
Clients are the life blood of ours, and any other business. We need them and we want them to need us. But how much do we really need them know about what we do? I mean, they've employed us for our expertise so they should just trust what we say, right?
Well no, not quite. For a start, we're not going to be around forever (don't panic, we're not terminal, just destined for other projects eventually). Even if we continue a long and fruitful relationship with them, we need clients to understand how to continue evolving their sites and products in a user-centric way during the periods when we're pulling our hair out over the next marketing manager's request to "quickly do some usability stuff".
And then there's multi-agency cooperation to consider. UXers often get tasked with being the glue that binds together a multi-disciplinary operation. We represent the user, the consumer, the person that's going to buy the product and keep the whole shebang afloat. So it's only natural we're seen as sense-checkers for the myriad of ideas whipped up every week by designers, developers, SEO specialists and eager account managers. It's a role of great responsibility and our clients need to know how we come to our conclusions in order to have confidence in what we suggest.
Loosening the purse strings is also a great deal less stressful if you're working with clients who truly understand the value of a UX strategy and what's involved. Think of the gazillions of dollars, pounds and Euros that are shelled out on SEO campaigns, all because there's an understanding that clicks = visitors = customers. Budget approval becomes so much easier when they also "get" that visitors + great experience = purchasers. We call it VCO.
So how can we educate our clients about what it takes to create and implement a cohesive, sustainable UX strategy? Here are a few ideas put forward by the folks who frequent UXexchange:
- Start the conversation with a prepared pitch. Something like "this is UX", "this is what I do", "this is the kind of thing you need to do more of", etc.
- Provide real life examples ("look - Amazon has long pages, would they do that if they didn't promote sales?)
- Give a brief explanation. For example, the whole fold model is a bit of a misconception, most users do scroll but you do need to do the right kind of design to show that there's some useful stuff further down the screen.
- Show references by handing over links they can look at if they're interested.
- Record and present user testing footage. Even better, invite members of the client team to come and observe every once in a while. "Light bulb moments" are priceless persuasion techniques.
- Inspire them by simply being brilliant. Show creativity and make sure they have fun getting involved in the IxD process. Create an internal senior stakeholder group and lighten it up a bit by having them take on user personas, or run some innovation games with them.
Any more top tips out there for educating clients? Do you disagree and think that the professionals should be left to get on with the job? Share your thoughts and we'll publish them before next week's post.
