March 22nd, 2004

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Technology
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Everyone’s a Designer

Alison’s rant is a common complaint of design professionals:

Anyway, the bottom line is, the customer is always right. But the customer comes to us for a reason. They can’t do it themselves, they need us. So please, offer your input, give your feedback, tell us what you want to accomplish; but let us be the expert, that’s why you hired us. Let us do our job. You’ll get a better product in the end. I promise.

This is really true of any contracted consultant, designer or otherwise. Sometimes, despite your best professional opinion, the customer will do what they want. There’s nothing you can do about that except clearly explain why you disagree, and write it down somewhere so that they can’t blame you when things break horribly later on.

Comments: 2 Responses so far

David
March 22nd, 2004
4:30 pm

Ah, so true. Faced that today. My favorite line - “Why are you so expensive. I did the same thing as you and it didn’t take me that long.” So, why’d you hire us to begin with? Geesh. It is worse when doing work for organizations that have marketing/design divisions that SHOULD do what your company does, but doesn’t. They are the worst. Hey, I don’t want your job folks, but if you can’t do it, which is why we are here, stop bitching. ARGH!!

Or, the companies that hire you for your creativity and uniqueness and every concept gets bashed down to the same old same old … then higher ups complain that your stuff is boring … hmmm, where’s the wine?

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Sue
March 22nd, 2004
10:42 pm

This is the reason why I stopped working for other consulting firms. We were delivering (imho) substandard solutions that were poorly designed, and the project management was all over the place because every time the client called, our project manager completely agreed to do everything they asked for, even though it would totally throw everything else off schedule/out the window. When I commented that perhaps, as professionals, we should advise our client that her requests were going to cause problems for the project budget, I was told that I had the wrong attitude towards customer service. That’s pretty much when I knew I wasn’t going to be happy working there.

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