If Architects Had To Work Like Web Designers

Shae that's hilarious! Great piece of writing, too - no one wants to listen to someone list complaints about difficult clients, but reading this is funny and drives all the points home at the same time and it's fun to read. Nice work!

This reminds me of an old project management piece I saw a few years ago.

However being a designer by education and love, I can completely understand (and all too deeply feel) the pain bad customers give us.

Design is one of the few careers that somehow attract the need for people to ask for dozens of hours in work just to bid on a project.

In an ideal world, I wonder if we should switch to the McDonald's design tactic-

"Let me get this right, you want a #4 website, hold the branding, super-sized, with a two e-mail newsletters and a side flash."

LOL.

Thanks for posting that, Shae. I've dealt with similar clients.

GAH! This is hysterical, I read it through a few times and it totally echoes my experiences at times too. Good luck!

Beautiful!

I'm not a designer but I think we all understand on some level. Or lots of levels. Thanks for sharing.

I think I was at THIS client's house this morning! I actually scaled a hillside and shimmied in a tiny window due to their apparently new awareness of things called keys. What a trite hassle they are... who needs to be bothered with keys, really?

Thanks ~ GREAT timing.

Shae, this is fabulously well-written. I love it, and it helps me totally empathize with the difficult job it is sometimes to design for someone who has no clue what is involved. I used to write copy for a living and can think back to one or two clients ... oh yeah.

As a possible proactive solution, I'm wondering if you could take what you have here, extract the key issues, and put together a humorous client-education piece to post on your website and give to all prospects and new clients. Light-hearted but bluntly honest would go pretty far to cut down on bad experiences like this one. My memory is tickling me that maybe Chris Haddad may have done something like this for his copywriting business...

My mind is wandering now... this is a problem many Bizniks face. I can almost imagine a collaborative effort, putting together a design-industry piece made available to everyone in the community. Not sure details, but making such a thing available to everyone might just help educate the whole public body of clients and potential clients. I'm wondering if something like this already exists, created or provided by some professional association or other. You might check that out.

The idea, though, suggests some kind of Biznik "guild" for designers, and by extension other guilds for other professions...??

That's priceless.

The travel trailer doesn't go to well on water! Fix it now - it's important, the millions of visitors I get will all see it!

"Bloody IE..."

ROTFL

goddamn. DUGG

Brilliant. Simply brilliant.

Architects are the WORST clients in the world. We've tired it 3 times and each time ended with us saying 'Thank your for the opportunity, here are few numbers of free clinics in your area that can help you diagnose whatever mental illness(es) you have. Godspeed!'

Our last one gave us a creative brief that reads (yes, i still have it) 'We want a site that reflects our love of space, diffuse light and textures. We need a site that makes people look up and outside of the screen and say 'this site is huge'. When I suggested that we make the site spray LSD every time it loads they didn't think it was funny.

This is something I've seen in emails back in the 90's. Funny, true, but not Ben's original work. :)

Love what you have written.

I have already copied this to share with a few architects, designers and web designers.

The icing was your comment on the drop shadows. Run away, run away

Kathleen

It seems that whoever wrote this seems to think that web designers have it much worse off than architects. I work as an architect designing houses for wealthy clients and while this story is somewhat of an exagerration, it actually isnt' too far off from typical demands. I think it is just due to the fact that our society doesn't appreciate design professionals in general.

That is a great piece and quite timely for me! I work as a solution designer for a software dev company. And I just went through this exact experience yesterday with a new client.

My job requires me to design the solution from the top down with the client. So, before designers like you guys get involved (although, I know that designers tend to do a lot of this). I actually talk through a very similar story WITH my clients before I start work, so they can understand what they are doing when they make certain statements.

My experience is very similar to this script;

CUSTOMER:I really want my dream home; it will have 30 bedrooms, 5 kitchens, room for 16 cars, an Olympic size pool and tennis court. How much will that cost? ME: Sure, of course we can do that, but it will take 9 months and cost $10Million. Shall we proceed? CUSTOMER: hmmm, I only had a budget of $250K ME: OK, why didn't you tell me the budget in the first place? CUSTOMER: Well, I didn't want you to know that :-) ME: Right.... (Thinking, this is going to be fun). OK for $250K, we can build you a modest 3 bedroom home with a 2 car garage. Will that satisfy your requirements? CUSTOMER: I guess so, but can you make sure that I can build extensions on it, so I can eventually have my dream home? ME: Sure, we will make sure the architect takes that into account when they are doing the Blueprints. But it will mean some compromising. CUSTOMER: Like What? ME: Well if you want to lay down foundations for your dream home, that will probably eat up 70% of your budget. And then there will only be enough budget for a 1 bedroom home with no kitchen. CUSTOMER: That just won't do. Wow, what a disappointing experience :-(

I find that this usually happens because the customer doesn't trust the experience. They trust the house building experience, because they usually know what to expect for a certain budget. But with Software and Web Sites, they have no idea, so they don't want to disclose the budget in fear of being ripped off, because they can't measure the web site investment against the one next door.....

My 2 cents.....

This resonates so perfectly, whether the client is a mom and pop operation or a fortune 500 company. Thank you, I'll surely think of this post every time I talk to my clients.

Yeah, for sure - people EXPECT homes to cost a lot of money, but since everybody knows that their neighbor's kid can cobble together a website that "looks pretty good" for the same price as mowing your lawn, they have high expectations for getting it done on the cheap, even when dealing with professionals. Also, there aren't the same standards bodies in web design - architects have to be state certified, but anybody can create websites. I prefer the openness of the web, but client conversations like this are part of the price we pay.

Well put.

I'm an architect, and the sad thing is that many of us *do* have to work like this. Not all the time, and not with all of your points at the same time, but I have been asked to design myriad solutions, document things "just for bid" but be responsible for changes, make adjustments on the fly, etc.

Seems design problems cross disciplines.

As a web designer, I can appreciate what you were trying to underline with your post. As an architect, I did not find that very funny. It turns out that the only unrealistic expectation that your client had was to move from blueprints to "under roof" in 48 hours. All the other requirements are commonly expected of architects, and no one thinks it's preposterous.

Lots of Expectation their:) Anyways, Nice Read.

By da way, I am an architect and some what working as a web designer :(_)

http://www.cgindia.org

Lots of Expectation their:) Anyways, Nice Read.

By da way, I am an architect and some what working as a web designer :(_)

http://www.cgindia.org

This is very well written and funny, and since I run both an architecture firm and an Internet start-up, particularly relevant to both my worlds.

The comment I would like to make (besides "...well done!") is that the issue you are making fun of here is also a problem for architects. Because clients are so familiar with homes, they "think" they know what they want, just like a client who uses the web thinks they know something about how to create a website.

I can tell you from being on both sides (consumer and provider) in both businesses that this is almost never true. This problem is endemic in both industries, and in every single commercial enterprise that must collect self-reported design criteria from a client.

The more emotional the project, the worse the problem is. So if a lot of money is involved, or a particularly personal project is on the table - like a home - it is almost impossible to get accurate design criteria by traditional methods.

I am very sorry to hear you had a "terrible client relationship" with an architect, but frankly that happens a lot with all types of "home" professionals, including real estate agents, interior designers and builders. Home Improvement is the # 1 consumer complaint category in the nation.

I would humbly propose that I know why. It's in our brains. About 95% of what the brain does each day that impacts our behavior is unconscious. (Want the research? - I can give it to you) That means that most of the real "criteria" for a design - whether it is a website, a home, a brochure, or an event - is not only unconscious, but emotional in nature.

We know what we like by what we feel. We think our rational processes are what drive our decisions, and certainly that is partly true...but when you are working to provide someone with a "personal" statement of some sort (again like a website or a home), emotion rules almost every time. They know what they like not when the see it, but when they feel the right way when they see it.

A home is an "emotional experience." A house is just a building.

The initial criteria clients bring to our firm is typically quite different than the criteria they end up with because we have developed a process over the years to deal with this issue. Before we did that, like every other architecture firm that designs homes, we had exactly the same problem you are talking about in the web development domain.

People think they know what they want but they really don't. We design what they tell us to, and they don't like it, and they think it is our fault.

Is that your experience with design clients? I bet it often is...

We are close to a beta launch with a web-based software application that handles that problem pretty well. The app can be adapted to other industries, like web-design, but we have applied it to what we know. That being buying, designing and building, remodeling and redecorating homes.

The reason...people like you who have a hard time getting the "difference between a house and a home" by using traditional methods. That's what we do. Tailor homes to people's tastes, lifestyle, budgets, values, life goals, relationships and circumstances.

I'll post when we launch and you can check it out. All that is at our domain right now are some temp user pages, but we will likely be launching in the next month.

And I hope you had good luck with replacing your "bad relationship."

Wow ... this is awesome :)

I think I will send my clinets here along with my proposals :)