Dealing with painful micromanager clients

09. Jan, 2010 0 Comments

Every freelancer has had them – the client that wants things exactly different. Sometimes they ruin the design and don’t make sense, sometimes it’s personal preference.

What we need to do, is educate our clients from the beginning. Feedback has to be objective and customer focused. If you’re dealing with a committee, get one person who can sign off on the design, and explain that personal preferences creates an environment where “too many cooks spoil the broth”. I try and do this early in the process, in the kickoff meeting or even in the sales process. Give examples of ideal feedback.

Have reasonings behind decisions. And not reasoning like “if it can’t be that color, I want to stab myself in the eye” or “reducing the padding makes me think it looks cramped”, but reasoning like “if we put that there, the page is going to get cluttered and the desired action we talked about for this page is less obvious”.

Take the time to go through design decisions with the client. Explain to them the design decisions in terms of objectives.

Despite that, there are still going to be clients that make you want to stab yourself in the eye. In these cases where I’ve educated the client, explained my reasoning and I’m still not getting anywhere, I happily turn my brain off, get the client to break down broad feedback into specific feedback, document all requests (because they contradict all the time) and just do what I’ve been asked to do. After all, it’s the clients design, not mine. Once clients get to this stage, they’re not concerned with having the best work, they’re concerned with having it look exactly how they want it.