Egos, clients and design. Wanna know our web designer’s opinions about the relationship between those three things?

Dear friend designer, I'm sure you've been through this.

As a designer, when I had a new project on the way, I fell in the trap of being “creative” and get right into photoshop pushing some pixels. In the meanwhile, I tried my best to make my work look as much great as I can. It was my goal to impress the client.

I was looking to get noticed and I thought that the thing that would get people’s attention was to build up a portfolio, but I was forgetting about the most important thing about design: it has solved real business problems as a way to improve people’s lives.

Since wasn’t noticing what I was missing out, as main result, I had to deal with unsatisfied clients. They would have a great looking website but at the same time a lack of user experience. Worse than that, I would put a lot of time and effort for...nothing.

As I was moving forward with my work, I’ve started to notice that design it’s not all about typography, colors and shapes - of course they play a big role in the design process, like defining if users will like or not - but we have to think about our final user.

We can have the most beautiful product - which people will enjoy - but have zero use for it, because they don’t know how to do it.

People make businesses grow - so if I wanted to change and grow as well, it was time to think about their problems (not mine, for once) and how could I solve them - this was the first step to get rid of my ego.

At the end of the day, you should provide services that solve people’s problems and make their life easier. Being honest, they’re paying us to do it, so the best we can do is to do it properly!

That’s why at Vitamina we are refining our design process.

DESIGN PROCESS

This design process was created to improve the communication between the team and the client and it’s divided into 5 steps - Discover, Explain, Ideate, Prototype and Test:

So, first of all, we try to get as much information as we can from our clients:

Which type of business are they in?
Which problem are we trying to solve?
Who will be our final users?
What can we do in order to make their life easier?
In which context will they use the product that we are creating?

These are all questions we have to ask ourselves every time we start a new project. It will help us to get as much context and information as we can.

Get on your client’s shoes and make sure you both are on the same page.

With all the information, you will have a better understanding of the problem, and you will be able to find a better solution.

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

Thinking about our client will help us to understand them. If we want to find a way to get valuable we have to provide value to others.

When we create something thinking about who is on the other side while we blend the client in the process - our solution will increase user experience.

Ultimately, it is a win-win situation. Clients pay us to solve problems, to work with them and care about their concerns, not just to build up beautiful products, it will help us go further and create a better relationship for both ways.

SET UP

The question in my mind for a good 2 days while I was letting this book sit there on my coffee table was: Why should I read it?

I’m not starting my own business or managing a team, I’m between jobs leaving a company that I love which couldn’t love me in return for a job in the stressful world of a digital agency. And so, I felt that there were more accurate books that would be more helpful in that moment.

However, one day (while I quickly ran out of other things to do - that were sooo major) I started reading the first paragraph in the book. And two weeks later, I had devoured the whole thing.

THE HOOK

Rework is all about asking the right questions. Although, you might think that does not apply to you, it does. If you are part of an industry, of a company, if you are a CEO, a freelancer or an intern you should read this book.

Rework makes you think about your behavior in the workplace and questions your attitude towards different problems. The solutions might not be what you are looking for but what’s key is the crucial questions it raises.

MUNDANE CONCLUSIONS

Business plans are trash, long meetings are the plague, the phrase “long-term strategy” means nothing and the ideal work week has between 10 and 40 hours in it. Yep. You read that right.

The authors live by the premises in the book, it’s their guide and has help them found a small company that every year makes millions of dollars which is 37 signals.

Here’s my take away from their philosophy:

Develop something that you would want to use on your daily life.

Start with something that could solve your personal problems or your work problems.
Focus on doing one thing right.

Failure it’s not a premise for success, learning from mistake is overrated.
Problems usually have simple solutions.

Don’t sweat more than you have to. You usually know what the consequences are, deal with them. Be open, humble and transparent.
Meetings are toxic.

If a meeting is mandatory then something concrete must come out of it.
The time to launch is now not later.

An ideal setting is never going to happen. Find out soon rather than later if your idea works.
Before hiring for a specific area, do the job yourself.

Then you know what works and what to expect from your employee.

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SEE ALSO: Why having a content strategy matters? Rework preaches what worked for the authors: a revolutionary work philosophy that focuses on personal satisfaction, productivity and the pursuit of an ideal.

‍It’s up to you to take away the conclusions that might really work for you.

Our web designer, Rui Bogas, has a really strong opinion about how you should bond with your clients. See if you agree!Clients are not evil, they are just taking care of their business.SEE ALSO: DESIGN FOR YOUR CLIENTS, NOT FOR YOU

Every time we start a new project, we have to put ourselves in other people’s shoes in order to understand what are their main concerns and find a way to solve their problems, but there’s a thing that we seem to forget sometimes and we seem to be most afraid of (even more than our final users). I’m talking about clients.

Of course there are all kinds of clients all over the world, but why do we feel afraid of them most of the times? In a matter of fact, they run their business and they want to succeed. But just like the steps we take to discover what our user wants, why don’t we force ourselves to understand our clients deeper and build a better relationship with them? What if we were in the same situation as them? What would be our needs? What do we value and we would like to see in other companies that we work with? How can I trust in those companies?

These are some important questions, but there’s a lot more that we need to ask in order to put ourselves in their shoes. If we were on their side, I’m sure we would do the same thing.

Why to put ourselves in their shoes?

First of all, we need to meet our clients and get to know them as much as possible. What does he like? What’s the most important for him?

Then we can think about some questions like: What does he really want to do? What’s the work all about? Why would he even think about that? Why not? How can it benefit his business? And so on…

Getting to know the client can be extremely powerful and that’s when they start to feel confident about us. It’s a great way to introduce ourselves and show him how do we work and which are the procedures. Here’s where our key point comes in! What about if instead of only showing him what we do, we integrate him in the work process in order to work towards the same goal?

That way it will help us understand his point of view and he will understand our way of work, experiencing working along with us.

Here at Vitamina., we are starting to do that and the results are showing. The only way to improve our work and deliver a product that solves real problems is through collaboration with clients and there’s nobody that understand their business better than themselves and at the same time, we are “designing for our client, not for us.”

The main advantages of working together

Working together with our clients will help us building a better and healthier relationship between us, we will be able to fulfill their needs, so that we can create more opportunities to work with them in the future.

‍Together, we can create better products with a better user experience, that solve real problems for every user's needs.

‍This is not an easy task, because every client is different, but with a lot of practice we start to get some results and provide more value for our clients, only this way we can be valuable.

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