How designers can build effective client relationships

This was the talk presented in the Virtual Design Meetup hosted by Nagarro in September. It was great to present my viewpoints on the theme of Building Trust through Design along with Mayur Chaudhary founder of Rethinking UX and Felix Lee, founder of Adplist.org.

Here are few excerpts from my talk:

As designers, we all understand the value of design and its impact on products and people associated with them. It is equally important for us designers to develop effective client relationships with our clients to be able to collaborate with them.

What do you mean by Client Relationships or Client Management?

In common terms, it is how you engage with the clients and build trust along this journey of developing a product. This journey includes understanding the need, research, design, and development of products and involves multiple stakeholders and designers.

Who are our clients?

In a typical product cycle, we commonly engage with both internal and external stakeholders.

External Stakeholders

The external stakeholders are the clients who are paying for the services we are providing. In a product organization. In a product organization, they could be the executive leadership who allocates the budget for product design, development, and marketing.

Marketing Leads

Marketing leads are responsible for the communication and delivery of the product. How product offerings provide value to the clients.

Sales Team

The sales team manages the relationship between the company and the clients. They collaborate between the stakeholders in management, marketing, and product management.

Product Managers

Product Managers are responsible for shipping the product to the market. They have an understanding of the vision and key requirements of the product. In a typical product development scenario, they talk to the client as well as the users.

Developers

Developers are the people who actually develop the product. They convert the design into a tangible working prototype. This team has an understanding about the technical capabilites and limitations to implement the designs.

Why is it important?

You may ask me why is it important to manage our stakeholders when our core expertise is to designs and what matters is that we accomplish our design goals. And we know that we are able to accomplish them. There are three reasons:

The foremost reason is the creation of the design. As designers, we need to understand the vision and the key requirements and the stakeholders help us in understanding that. The most likely knows more than we think in terms of business and markets and we should leverage that knowledge. The second reason is the success of the product. Each of the team members, be it the designers or the stakeholders want the product to succeed once it is launched. By success, I mean that users are able to use it. More and more people users lead to clients being retained. The third reason is definitely the success of the products lead to more clients and more business. This holds good for the service industry as well as the design agencies. However, in a product organization, the success of the product means whether it has achieved the impact its creator had intended and if it has then the product can be scaled up further. Most importantly this constant evolution along with a Design Intervention helps in building better products and services.

How to build effective client relationships?

Here are 3 key strategies that would help you to build effective client relationships

Set Expectations

Before I elaborate on the first strategy, let me share an incident. This was a few years back when I had passed out of Design school and joined a large IT organization. It was my first project. We had a kick-off meeting with the client

Some key questions you can start with are:

1. What is important for the different sets of stakeholders involved?

2. What has been decided for the product so far?

3. What tech decisions have been made?

4. Who are the end-users?

You can include the questions as you include in the stakeholder interviews. Always validate your assumptions. Involve the key stakeholders. You should know who to talk to. Sometimes in large projects, it is not possible to involve everyone together. In that case, talk with them in one-to-one meetings. The most important thing is to involve them at every stage. Think of yourself as a relationship manager who is a bridge between the business, functional and technical teams. In my experience, I have seen that despite the ability to speak about our work, many of us have yet to master the skill of explaining our role to the non-designers. Tell them about your working style, timelines, and deliverables. Decide on the preferred communication channels and collaboration of documents. This would be done at the beginning of any engagement.

Understand Project Goals

Apart from the client knowing about you it is equally important for you to understand the project goals. Remember each of the team members is collaborating to launch a product. You are also an equal contributor.

Build Trust

Understand it is a collaborative discovery. Once you have set the expectations with all stakeholders, collaborate with them effectively to get the maximum benefits.

• Clearly articulate your process and map it with the format of the deliverables.

• Create a detailed plan with timelines. Decide on the sign off process. Stick to the timelines and communicate clearly about any possible delays. This adds to the trust value.

• Share regular updates with the client to get their feedback at every stage. This will reaffirm the expectations established at the start of the project.

• Always be an ally to the team. Do not think of it as them and us. It happens with many of us. We always tell the clients to empathize with the users. Similarly, it is important for us to empathize with the clients to effectively collaborate with them. Always strive for open discussions during which all sides feel comfortable to share their ideas, not confrontations. Remember, they have a lot more invested in the project than you are and you should acknowledge that.

Follow the process but do not get stuck with the process

As designers, we are attached to the processes and methodologies. It is always a good practice to communicate about them to the clients. What is a design process? These are frameworks that help us to reach a certain stage and take design decisions. Sometimes it does happen that we are not able to follow a process perfectly and that is OK. Do not get fixated with it. Be fluid and flexible in the approach you take. Every project is different, every client is different then how can the process remain the same. Tweak the process as per your requirements. Having said that, do not get fixated with the process. One thing you should always do is talk to the end-users because as designers we are advocating for the user needs which is most important for any design. Sometimes it does happen that you are not able to talk to the end-users. In that case try and get access to the user data, web analytics which gives you insights on user needs and pain points. Talk to the Business Analysts who have conducted user workshops. And if at all you have created the designs without talking to the end-users then validate them by conducting usability testing. This will help you to validate your design decisions and even the clients will understand the value of your design process.

Create in context and prioritize your design decisions

Strategic design is an amalgamation of research insights, user needs, and ongoing design trends. Always keep the project goals in mind while taking the design decisions. Whenever you are discussing your designs with the client, prioritize what is important from the users' perspective and overall project goal. Do not get fixated with every design decision. Be open to client feedback. You have to listen to the client in order for him to listen to you. Let me give you an example, imagine for a moment there is navigation that you have designed and feel is important then back it up with research and stand by that decision but if there as few visual design elements which the client want to change then think about how it affects the user and it is not a major impact then let it go. Try to take a balanced approach. Building consensus is a very important skill that we should master as designers. Do not take the onus of the whole design on yourself. The core idea is to create a usable product and it does not matter if few ideas come from you or any of the stakeholders.

Your design deliverables should be useful and usable by the product team

Understand the requirements of the product team and plan your deliverables around that. For e.g, if you have conducted user research then along with the research findings do mention the key insights and design recommendations which the team can rectify in the short term or long term. This will help them understand the value of the task and make your deliverables useful. Give them low fidelity prototypes to get early feedback before you get into the detailed design. This will save a lot of rework. Also while working on the final deliverables, align with the development team for successful implementation of the proposed design.

Communicate Effectively

According to my communicating effectively is the most important pillar for effective client management. Think about communicating your ideas and not just what to present. Sometimes during design discussions or whenever we send the designs for the feedback we say that these are the wireframes or the screens. Let us know your feedback. This is not the right approach as you may not receive the appropriate feedback. Few pointers to keep in mind while presenting your designs are:

Summarize the problem you are trying to solve

Always prepare the key talking points before presenting your designs. Structure your thoughts.

Articulate clearly about your artifact and how it demonstrates the specific solution that has to be discussed.

In this way, you are communicating a problem as well as a possible solution and that adds value and credibility to your effort.

Use the terminology which the clients understand

As designers, we are well versed with certain terminologies and jargon which we commonly use in our conversations. Articulate your designs in a very simple language that can be easily understood by the clients. Understand the clients' knowledge may not be as much as you hance you might need to explain certain terms or concepts.

Communicate on what specific solutions are you expecting s feedback from the client

We take a lot of design decisions based on our assumptions, insights, and understanding. It is important for us to articulate our design decisions as well as be specific on which decisions do we want the client's feedback on. Imagine for a moment you have created few screens where you have tried to solve the interactions within those screens, instead of the client giving feedback on those, they start pointing out the color of the fonts and the buttons. This leads to a long discussion and you have still not received the feedback you were expecting. Articulate the solution well and specifying will save you this long discussion and make your collaboration worthwhile and help you reach a decision.

Respond appropriately to the client feedback

Design is an iterative process and the client's feedback is an important part of it. Do not think feedback is a negative thing. active listening is a skill we all should try to imbibe. This will help you to understand his perspective. Do not respond to negative feedback with a quick No. If you do not agree to it then provide reasons and back up your reasons with data and research. Provide alternate solutions. One thing we all would understand is that positive design feedback does not mean that the solution cannot be improved and negative feedback does not mean that the solution is bad. Therefore accept any feedback without losing confidence in the original approach.

In a nutshell, the 3 strategies which you can use to build effective client relationships are:

• Set Expectations

• Build Trust

• Communicate Effectively

These will help to understand the client's vision, collaborate and communicate at their level, and present ideas and design decisions effectively for a tangible business impact.