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Client Horror Clients Web Development

A Painful Client Experience – Lessons Learnt

After close to two years I’ve completed a stupidly painful client ecommerce website. This whole experience turned into a classic saga, including lots of scope creep. The purpose of this post is to highlight some of these errors and hopefully help others.

Originally, when I took on the client (I coin him “Derek” from now on …) I wasn’t overly busy, so needed the work and project. Before anything work had been done I’d made my first mistake – the job, which was an ecommerce website, was quoted out several hundred pounds lower than normal, to match a similar quote the client had.  I’d worked out the cost for the job and knew fairly accurately how many hours the job was going to take and originally quoted accordingly. For the amount of work the client wanted the original price was very competitive and I should have stuck to that price from the get go. Instead, the client was able to talk us down on price. Before the project had even started, a precedent was set. In retrospect, I should have never ever lowered the price at the request of the client as I’d been good and worked out the amount of hours required beforehand.

The Initial Client Meeting

The next failure came from the very first meeting with the client. Derek came to our offices for the initial meeting to discuss requirements in detail- this is normal and to be expected. It’s a great time to set out expectations and discuss some of the finer details. I’d always allow 3-4 hours maximum for this, with the majority of meeting not going on for more than 2 hours. However, Derek totally dominated the whole day and discussed at great length his requirements. In retrospect, after a certain period had passed, I should have put my foot down and said it’s time to charge for the time. At the end of the meeting, the client then requested a bespoke holding page designed for their rather quirky brand. One of our designers agreed to do this as a favour. This is bad enough, but Derek then sat next to the said designer until it was complete, giving their pointers throughout. Even worse (yes…) the client then wanted it developing “as soon as possible”. I said no problem, we can get this done within the next 2 days for you, as I have a couple of deadlines on currently. Derek said he had people waiting and needed the site now. Stupidly, I agreed to develop it on the spot, with Derek literally sitting behind my shoulder until it was complete.

I’m still not sure how this came about, maybe a slight desperation to get and please a new client. However, the upshot of it, was that in that one the client took up 8 working hours and had a holding page designed and developed with zero cost. That’s a serious amount of money. Never ever do additional work without charging – it sets an awful precedent for the whole project and (see below) it makes charging for additional “real” work very hard. Clients who take their businesses seriously and who are plain, reasonable people accept that time equals money – it’s as simple as that. As soon as the meeting ran on for longer than usual it should have been stopped and the time billed. A whole day for an initial meeting is frankly, insanity.

Clients are NOT Design Experts

The next point relates to the actual web design. Derek had a very specific niche and brand for the target audience and wanted the design to match his own preferences as opposed to a customer. There’s a lot written about this subject, but ecommerce websites have certain design elements in place on purpose so they are highly usable and convert visitors into paying customers – it’s a business after all! Derek totally failed to realise this even after lots of advise to him on the subject from myself. The design department is partially at fault here as they let Derek get far too involved in designing the site. The result was a very nice looking website, that was essentially not usable as an ecommerce store. All at the request of Derek, lots of heavy imagery and no focus on usability. Again, as I wasn’t overly involved in this stage I’m not 100% sure how it actually came about, I’m only aware it was the undoing of this project. To make things even worse, Derek constantly cited that he had to see every page designed as proof, “to get a proper idea how the store will work and appear”. This is fair enough, but multiple designs for web pages are all very time consuming and should be charged for. This effect is compounded for an ecommerce store, that has more pages and layouts than a normal store. When the site came over to myself to be developed (see next point) there were 29 separate layered Photoshop files – insanity! All these separate designs had to be painstakingly signed off by the client.

The crux of the matter is that the client, Derek, is paying ourselves for our expertise. He’s not a web designer, usability expert or web developer. He’s a business owner. He designed the site for himself and we let him. Both parties are at great fault here.

Another negative factor here regards scope creep. As Derekis making all his design changes he’s unknowingly adding in new features, all of which need to be developed into the final site. These are all on top of what Derek has originally been quoted for. Again, this scope creep wasn’t caught early enough in this instance and resulted in countless hours of extra work, all unpaid.

Fast forward to the point where I actually get the design for the first time and it’s apparently all signed off and ready for me to develop. After 10 minutes of looking at the PSDs my first thought was that the site looks very nice, but is going to be silly slow to load, of course bad for an ecommerce store. I did the right thing and raised this to design and Derek who wanted to come in for a meeting to discuss this. He explained that he was relying on ourselves and was taking guidance from us, as Derek is’t a designer or developer (not shit Derek …). I explained to him that his excessive design changes and wanting to get far too involved in the design resulted in a site that wasn’t going to work particularly well for an online shop. The result of this was that the site went back for a further round of design changes to “tone down” the site. Derek was adament he wasn;t to blame for this either. At this stage Derek should have been told that a further round of design changes were chargeable – as there would be a new initial design and inner page designs – all requiring signoff and lots of extra time. I’ll simply echo the above point again, let the client give you their brief for the design, but never ever let them become involved and make constant design decisions. They’re the client, you’re the expert. Put your foot down. The result – Derek now thinks we suck and don’t communicate as business. It’s just simpler for everyone if things like this are kept formal and no seemingly “favours” are done for the client. It always ends in pain. There’s also the secondary effects of having a designer working insanely long amounts of time on a single project – they’re not free to complete other, paying projects. It’s a very bad situation all around.

Design Changes After Development

One of the main things that made this project drag on, after the stupidly excessive design time, was the fact that Derek assumed that he was free to make key design and development changes after the site had been fully developed and placed on our staging area. As any sane designer or developer will tell you, no one can afford to work this way. The mistake I made here was making the said minor changes at this stage to hopefully get the project complete and for my own sanity. When I thought I was helping the client, I wasn’t. As the changes built up I had no choice but to say that the time is now chargeable. Derek came in yet again (this will be roughly the 5th meeting, with a normal meeting lasting 4-5 hours) for a meeting to discuss. When I stupidly assumed Derek would be a reasonable human being, he took the what I call “cop-out” approach, by saying he “didn’t know”, he wasn’t an expert and assumed this is the way things work. After a very painful meeting Derek agreed to pay some minor costs, but nowhere near the amount of time he actually took up. To Derek’s credit, no where in his quotation did it state exactly how the design and development process would work. He simply pleaded ignorance yet again.

Training Time

Something that always needs to be factored into more complicated websites is training time with the client. Whilst what follows was a very costly mistake I’ve since learnt from it and made sure it can never happen again. Firstly, Derek’s contact was fairly lax when it came to training and wasn’t very specific. As a result, Derek brought in his colleague on the day and came totally un prepared. This meant there were two lots of questions being fired at me instead of training for a single person – the result is more wasted time. Another point was the fact that Derek hadn’t seen the administration area before and was seeing it for literally the first time when he came to be trained. In retrospect this never works as it means you have go through literally everything. What I’ve done since, is give the client the admin area, let them use before the training session. This allows the training to be more focused on the areas the client doesn’t know and allows them to ask specific questions. Since this has been implemented, time spent training clients has decreased ten fold. A further point was that the training dragged on a long time, I worked it out to roughly 5 hours. I’d originally costed for up to 2.5 hours. In retrospect, when the 2.5 hour mark was reached the training should have stopped.

During the training, the previous issue of site speed, inherent from the latter design saga above, came to light yet again. Due to all the graphic STILL included in the site, all at Derek’s request, the site did load unacceptably, yet unavoidably slow –  even on a phone line with 14 meg business ADSL. To my shock Derek kept saying this was “unacceptable” and even began to critique the design – all of which he’d signed off beforehand. After I’d calmly explained that Derek himself had signed everything off at the design stage and that I covered with him personally the issue of site speed well before development, the 5 hour meeting ended up with Derek walking out. Granted, his colleague did apologise on behalf of him before leaving themself. All of that could have been avoided by not doing the client favours and sticking to our own processes. Take note any designers or developers who think being overly accommodating to customers is actually helping them. Overall, it isn’t. If you have set processes, stick to them like glue.

Follow up Client Training

To add insult to injury, Derek seemed very uninterested whilst I was demonstrating the system and wasn’t even taking notes. I found this is a little insulting to be honest. So, to my total annoyance the following day Derek called me asking for help on basic things I’d shown him the day before. This was yet another 40 minute telephone call.

The day after that, I got another email saying Derek would be getting his “IT Guy” involved, who would be asking me further questions. He said I should answer questions promptly and as fully as I would to Derek. Hang on a moment. Derek can’t be arsed to listen during training and now is asking me to provide further training to a third party. At this stage I had to say enough is enough and say all support request must now come via email and that they can’t come from third parties. This clearly annoyed Derek, who later came in for yet another “crisis” meeting. The upshot was a list of further development updates (all of which we should have charged for) and an unhappy Derek.

Furthermore, Derek became quite fixated or very confused with image sizes for his products. I’ve decided to cover this in a separate post about image resizing pain, as it deserves it’s own post. Result – lots more wasted time.

Contacts – Be Specific, Save your Sanity …

At the time of Derek’s website my contract wasn’t overly specific. It touched on a lot of the points raised above but wasn’t specific. For example my contract now:

  • Explicitly states how the design and development process works
  • Explicitly states that additional design and development are chargeable
  • States exactly how much training is given, for how many people and that training is not provided to third parties
  • Any additional time will be chargeable
  • The amount of support given afterwards
  • Additional meetings are chargeable
  • Additional inner page designs are also chargeable
  • Introduced a minimum charge, or administration fee

In this project, and in earlier days, in essence I placed too faith in a customer being a reasonable person. For instance, the customer appreciating that me spending excessive amounts of time on a certain activity is chargeable. I’ve since learnt, the hard way, not to do this.

Whilst you may think that you’re helping a client by doing them a small task for free early on, you’re really setting yourself up for a big fall later on. A precedent of charging for your time needs to set early on the project. If it’s not, then scope creep will rear its ugly head and become totally unmanageable, very quickly.

The only plus I can take from the whole sorry saga, is that I learnt a lot from the above mistakes and certainly won;t (and haven’t) be making them in future projects. As bad as it sounds, every designer or developer should have come across a nightmare client like Derek, as it does help with the learning process. Granted, it;s costly, but the lessons are certainly never forgotten! 🙂