As a homeowner in the midst of several home-improvement projects I’m THE CLIENT an awful lot lately. Seeing how it feels to trust someone to do things I can’t (or don’t want to) do has been an enlightening experience – especially given that my role as a practitioner puts me in the position of selling and delivering on exactly that… for someone else.
“Well, it just so happens that I’d love to organize your 40,000 pages of content! Rock on!”
“How many gigs of log files do need parsed? Half a terabyte? Perfect!”
To some, the problems I help solve are as overwhelming as building a new deck or laying a new garden path is for me.
Take, for example, the landscaper I’ve hired for our garden. Her positive attitude has completely changed the way I view the space that she’s creating. A space, it should be mentioned, that I’ve never been happy about or proud of because it’s represented something insurmountable and problematic since I purchased the home. She’s redesigning my yard for all intents and purposes. I redesign things all the time! How can I generate that sort of positivity with my creations? How can I convey my excitement and positive attitude to my client during the redesign process? Most especially, how can I transfer that excitement and positivity so that my client feels it about what I’ve created?
In the last two years I’ve had a deck built from scratch; a broken water heater replaced; trees that were too close to the house trimmed back; and a 70-foot-tall oak tree that fell in a spring storm triaged. In my own recent experience I’ve been THE CLIENT from a host of perspectives and that reality extends itself into web-related work.
Clients are coming to us for new ideas, improvements on old ideas, fixes for broken systems, maintenance needs and disaster relief. We practitioners need to recognize why our clients need us beyond the fact that they can’t (or don’t want to) do it themselves. Someone with a idea for a new website is of a very different mindset from a client with an outdated one. Someone whose website is broken is going to approach fixing it in a very different manner from someone whose site has just been hacked. From a practitioner’s perspective, the garden (or website) might end up looking the same no matter where the starting point, but from a client-relationship viewpoint we’ve got an opportunity on our hands. If we can understand where the client is emotionally and why they need us, we can approach the solution with an unexpected sensitivity and deliver a truly fulfilling experience.
One Comment
Great post! I hope you will write more often as you find the time.