Communicative nerdship
Patience with details and understanding that technology is not everyone's daily bread and butter is part of our profession. "Can't you just explain to me what an API is?" said Barbara ten Berge of HE Space. She once caught me sighing. Too often we give an arrogant, know-it-all impression. Let's become proficient in communicative nerdiness: only when the customer perspective and technical possibilities are aligned can you make good things. And fortunately Ten Berge has long since forgiven me for that sigh.
4. Technical blinkers
Spaans has experienced it before: “The client comes with a functional question and the agency comes with a technical solution. Thinking from a communication issue often proves difficult. 'That's not how it was made, it can't be done.' – they say.”
Spaans is right, there are usually more possibilities if you ask more about the why and what for. Especially because customers tend to express a wish as a functionality that seems logical to them, but that technically makes no sense. They know a lot. But then firmly saying “It’s not possible.” and going about the business of the day is greece telegram data pretty bad contracting. Your customer has a problem. Come on. Ask more questions and think along. “Tell us what we need,” says Arthur Barendsen of the Municipality of Leiden. In order to be able to do that, we have to delve into what the client is going through. Attention is essential. “For example, if you don’t know the difference between energy and electricity when you do an assignment with us, then I actually already know that it’s not going to work out,” says Van de Haar.
If you succeed in building trust, it is worth a lot. We have been working with Jet van Paassen of the Delfland Water Authority for years. She recently came to me with a very understandable request and I immediately thought 'can't do it'. I had no idea how to explain it. It was about a static exception at a fairly deep level in a dynamic whole. Because that was not a story, I simply said that I had to think of an explanation. I tried with a kind of metaphor, but that did not get through. In the end, this client decided, while accepting the alternative we proposed, to trust our expertise. Gratefully, we got to work.
5. Aesthetic nagging
We are hired to be creative, but if “the client is a marginal phenomenon in the artwork that is being made”, client Van der Haar will completely drop out. Of course, we all see that fluent design will be all the rage in 2019, that Helvetica Neue is bold-lit and that you can no longer show up anywhere without drop shadow. But, if the client doesn’t want to, you can still try to explain why you think it all fits the purpose and audience and so on, but in the end you work on commission. Don’t nag.