You're My Favorite Client

You know a lot more about design than you give yourself credit for.

You know bad design when you encounter it. From every chair you’ve sat in that hurt your ass, to every coffee cup that burned your hand, to every time your finger triggered the wrong link on your phone, to every airline booking site that pissed you off. You know bad design. You hate it. And you should. Because anything designed poorly could’ve been designed better. The truth is that good design isn’t magic: it takes a clear goal, the expertise and resources to reach that goal, and, most of all, the intention to do it well.

As smart as you are about design (and you are! Go read from the beginning if you don’t yet believe it), sometimes the goals you’re trying to achieve need the services of someone who designs solutions for a living. People trained to solve problems. The difference between being design savvy, which many people are—including yourself—and having design skills is experience honed over time. We may all appreciate a nice pair of shoes, but few of us can actually make them.

As with any profession, you have good designers, bad designers, and designers that aren’t right for you. Designers—I’m one of them—can be difficult to work with. It can be intimidating to search for design services without a playbook.

Successful design projects need equal participation from the client and the designer. Yet the design process remains a mystery to the people who buy it. Design isn’t sausage. You’ll enjoy it even more if you understand how it’s made.

Design isn’t magic and it isn’t art. It’s a craft. Design solves a problem within a set of given constraints. We’ll talk about why those constraints matter. Much as a doctor needs patients to practice their craft, a designer needs clients to practice theirs. Like walking into a doctor’s office, describing what’s wrong, and then having your doctor diagnose the problem and prescribe a solution, working with a designer is the same. You tell us what’s wrong, and we research, come up with a plan, and design a solution. We don’t ask for blind trust, but we do ask that you respect that we’ve been trained in handling a scalpel. And maybe a little trust

A well-designed world is a better world. I love knowing that a thoughtful piece of user interface makes someone’s life go a bit easier, whether it’s designing a menu that’s accessible to someone with low vision or watching my seventy-one-year-old father intuitively use an iPad for the first time. Good design has the power to change lives in big and small ways.

To any designers reading this book: I’m here to help you too. Many clients have never bought design services. Don’t assume your clients come to the table knowing what you need to make the process go well. Feel free to use this book to introduce new clients to the design process. The more your clients know what’s needed to make a project, the more successful you’ll both be. Give a copy to everyone who walks through your door!

What do I mean by design? Design is how we communicate what an object does, or its function, through its shape or form.

Take a baseball mitt. Study it for a bit, and it becomes obvious that your hand goes inside. That’s form. The minute you have the mitt on, you understand it makes it easier to catch a baseball. That’s function.

Design is also the process we undertake to solve a problem. It fucking hurts to catch a baseball with your bare hand. A mitt is the solution to that problem.

If you and I were to design a chair together, we’d have to consider some factors from the get-go. Of course, we’d consider the seat’s size, the height from the ground, the angle of the back, the materials, and the fabric. Before we made any of those decisions, we’d ask ourselves about the chair’s goals. Who would be using the chair? What would they be doing? How would the chair benefit the person sitting in it? These answers affect how we communicate its function. When a person’s expectation of the chair matches their experience of sitting in the chair, they get more joy out of it. This is design done right.

Will those considerations ensure that the chair is well designed? No, but they certainly increase the odds. Not thinking about them ensures that our chair is badly designed.

Yet when we build websites or apps, we often wait until the last minute to bring in designers to “apply” design, or look and feel. This is akin to baking a cake and then hiring a baker to make it taste good

Imagine two chair shops across the street from each other. One shop takes the chair’s design into consideration from the start. They hire the best chair designer they can. The chair designer researches other chairs on the market to figure out where they’re lacking. They ask people what they like and dislike about their current chairs, research materials, consider the chair company’s budget and profit margin, and source materials and manufacturing to make sure the chair is built right. They test different designs. They make adjustments. They test again. They come up with a solid design that meets both the company’s goals and people’s desires. The chair goes into production. It sells well. Everyone is now rich. The people at the chair shop across the street also make a chair. They select adequate materials and make a seat, some legs, a back. This is definitely a chair! Then they hire a designer and say, “Make this a comfortable chair!” The designer adds a sad little foam rubber seat cushion. The chair bombs. Everyone dies of dysentery.

The value of good design is the increased possibility of success. We understand its importance in everyday objects like chairs, clothes, watches, coffee[…]

As my good friend Jared Spool says, “Design is the rendering of intent” (http://bkaprt.com/ymfc/2/). When the intent isn’t clear, the project stakeholders can’t agree on goals, or two founders veer in two directions to take their company, no amount of design can solve that situation. Design doesn’t work if you don’t know your intent. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself in the land of mullets, half-cafs, cran-grape drinks, platypuses, and El Caminos (FIG 1). (Granted, platypuses are pretty cool. But they’re filled with poison.)

Designers can design a solution to a problem, but they can’t design a solution to a disagreement. Some designers try to apply the wisdom of Solomon by coming up with a solution so terrible the disagreeing parties have no choice but to finally agree. This never works. And they soon find themselves breathing life into Frankenstein’s monster. A designer should never put something in front of you they don’t stand by.

The most crucial thing we discover is how you work as a team. We need to know how many people actively publish to or maintain the website, and how much time they commit to it. We also need to know their skill sets. Any decent design solution takes your resources into account.

So when a client says, “We want tons of big photos,” my next question is, “Who’s going to source those?” When we don’t have a clear answer, or when the indicated individual lacks the skill set (and sourcing photography is a skill), the website will probably fail. The same applies to infographics, only it’s ten times worse.

If I design a system that you lack the resources to sustain, I’m not doing my job. I haven’t designed a solution to the problem; I’ve created a problem. A good designer can’t in good conscience deliver something to a client knowing it will fail.

Be wary of gravitating toward a design that calls for a nonexistent resource

No work is so good that it makes people happy they were left out. As difficult as the conversation or logistics may be to get those people on board before the project begins, I guarantee you (and I’ll give you few guarantees in this book) that conversation is easier than the conversation when they realize they’re out of the loop.

So before you scope the project or interview designers, ask yourself, “Who can kill this project?” Involve that person! Make an ally, not an enemy. Include your designer in the conversation. I’d much rather help you convince your CEO at the project’s onset than stand in her office three-quarters of the way through the project to explain how I’ve been spending her money

For design to be truly great, you need to build it into your projects from conception.

To get design’s full value, you need to hire a professional. You need a designer. Would you trust any other valuable part of your business to someone who wasn’t qualified to do it? Would you let your cousin’s best friend do your accounting because they had a calculator? Or let your neighbor reprogram your fuel injection system because they have three cars on blocks on their lawn?

We hire professionals because we can hold them accountable. If you get audited, you better believe you’re taking your accountant with you to the hearing. If the credit card processing system on your site goes down, you want to know that your engineering team is on it. You also want to be able to call them into your office and ask what happened. When your users can’t figure out your site’s interface, you want to know you’ve got people trained in designing effective interfaces on the job. When you ask people to take on tasks that are neither part of their job nor something they’re trained at, you have no right to complain if they screw it up

The only way out from unclear goals is to talk through them until you’ve achieved clarity of intention. (Pro tip: do this in a room with no windows and no chairs that also smells like eggs. You’ll cut your time in half.)

You can’t design a system for profit unless you understand where that profit comes from. At the least, you can’t design it well. To tell whether something is designed well, you need clear metrics. One such metric should be whether the business model is successful, if you want to stick around. With a clear and reasonable business model, you have a chance at a successful design.

Say you hire a designer and your business model is ad-driven. The designer does an excellent job optimizing the ad spots to generate revenue and places them where advertisers will pay a premium. Two weeks after launch, you decide your most important metric for success isn’t ad revenue but the number of newsletter subscribers, which was a low priority during the redesign. You look at the number of newsletter subscriptions, and it’s a weak number. Does that mean the site wasn’t designed correctly? No. That’s the site working as designed. When your business model shifts, you need a redesign—so hammer out your business goals before you start

No one comes to a site because of the design. They come for the content or the service, like booking air travel. The design should encourage them to stay, offering a wonderfully easy-to-understand and even delightful way to interact with that content or service. Bad design can certainly bury good content, but you can’t design a “premium experience” and pour crap content into it with any expectation of success.

It’s all about content, people. Design is what holds it together. So before you drop a chunk of money and time on design, get some writers and content strategists. And beware of people who talk about “consuming content.” No one has ever woken up with the desire to consume content in their life.

Designers advocate for your users

Your success depends on how well your product or service meets the needs of the people who use it, and how many people you get to use it. Good designers understand this. They find out who your customers are, how they behave, and how they think. Some designers even create personas to better represent these people so it’s easier to plan and design with them in mind.

Every designer in the world needs to be able to answer: “Why did you do that?” If their reply is, “I can change it,” you’re absolutely fucked.

“I think it looks good” is not a rationale. It’s a red flag.

A solid, thoughtful rationale also nicely sets the table for good feedback. If your designer says they made a decision based on research and best practices, they’re doing their job. But a designer who says they were “inspired” to do something opens the door for a stakeholder to give feedback that’s just as subjective. Whim begets whim. Now you’ve got a roomful of people arguing about their favorite colors.

My friend Jared Spool, whom I’ve now quoted twice, says, “The best designers are passionate about design, but dispassionate about their own designs.” (http://bkaprt.com/ymfc/4/). It’s a good line. I wish I could take credit for it. (I eventually will.)

There’s a big difference between defending work, which a designer must know how to do, and being defensive about work, which a designer should never do. When you point out an obvious problem to a designer and they keep fighting, they’re no longer fighting for the work’s quality. They’re fighting for their ego. A good designer is confident enough to fight for what’s right and acknowledge what’s wrong.

Of course, you should make sure the criticism focuses on the work, not the person presenting the work.

A designer is a communication professional. When I start a project I get to know everyone on the client’s team. I learn what they do, how they tick, how best to communicate with them; I develop relationships and trust. Projects take a while. You’ll work together for a long time. You have information in your head that’s crucial to the project’s success, and I’m guessing you may not be quick to give it to someone who doesn’t treat you with respect and kindness. You don’t have to put up with the solitary genius or the asshole genius.

A designer confident in their decisions is confident enough to listen to criticism. They’re showing you results based on systematic thought not a magical moment. People are more open to their math being wrong than having their fairy tales spoiled.

You don’t hire them to be your friend or to design to your own whims. You hire a designer to solve a problem. I’ve seen too many designers throw their research and good sense to the wind because the client expressed a personal preference and demanded they follow it. You don’t want a designer who ends up doing the best work you can come up with. You want them designing the best work they can come up with.

Don’t make responding to the RFP a chore.

You don’t want to pick a design partner because they scored high on your questionnaire, remembered to send the specified number of copies, and punched everything on your itemized, prescriptive list. You want to pick the design firm that does good work. That may be the firm that questions whether your list will achieve your goals.

A good designer is a storyteller. They understand how to get you intrigued, when to reveal parts of the plot, and when to deliver exposition. Their portfolio should guide you through their site and spark your curiosity; this is how you want your own sites to work. More important, the samples should have context. You know the adage that good work speaks for itself? It’s bullshit. To properly evaluate whether this person is the right designer for you, you need to know the context for their work. What problem did they solve? What was their timeline? Which audiences did they address?

When I go to a Mexican restaurant for the first time, I always get the enchiladas. If they can’t make enchiladas, they can’t make anything else. It’s a cornerstone of Mexican cooking. When I evaluate a designer’s portfolio, I first look at how they use typography. Very simply: can you read the damn site? Is it scannable? Do you know what to read first? Is reading pleasant? Type is a cornerstone of good design, and type exists to be read. If a designer doesn’t have a solid typographic grasp, I wonder about other holes in their foundation.

We were selling design as a cost of doing business. A sunk cost. A necessary evil. I’m here to tell you a better story: design is a profit center. You’ll make more money from your website than the designer ever will.

If you have a product that fills a need or creates a desire, and you take care to design it well, you’ll do better than someone who has a similar product that isn’t designed well. If you disagree, feel free to toss your brown Zune across the room in anger.

If you’ve ever worked with designers, you may have noticed that the vast majority are more than slightly uncomfortable talking about money. Between the two of us, I’ll admit that for most of my career I was too. But then I discovered two important things: one, when I was afraid to charge my clients what the work was worth, I spent time I was supposed to dedicate to solving their problems worrying about paying my rent; two, when you charge people what the work is actually worth, they pay more attention to the project because they’ve invested more.

So when you discuss pricing with your designer (and it should be a discussion), make sure they can stand behind their quote. Have them walk you through it and explain why they’re charging what they’re charging. You should get an itemized breakdown for the project’s major parts. Some designers and studios may even be willing to give you an hourly list of costs. Just remember that if the job includes figuring out your overall strategy, a line-by-line breakdown may be impossible, since neither of you knows exactly where those costs reside yet. Better to deal with flexible buckets of time that accommodate a project’s shifting needs

Salaries vary dramatically based on geography, experience, market demand, company type, etc. So if you’re after an equation, I’ve got a simple one: pay your designers as much as you pay your engineers. Pay your design director the same as your other directors. And pay the ones willing to disagree with you twice as much as the ones who aren’t.

In fact, budget is the first thing we ask prospective clients. This question tends to make people nervous. I’ve had clients flat out refuse to tell me, saying that if they disclose that information, I’ll tell them that’s what the work will cost.

That’s partially true.

I’ll tell you what you can get for that amount. Then we can talk about whether you need that much design. But most of all, that number tells me how to guide you toward the appropriate solution and avoid solutions outside of your price range

Most studios, us included, insist on a deposit based on a percentage of the project before we start work. Depending on the project’s size, it could range from 25% to 50% of the total project cost. Design studios aren’t a high-margin business. Getting that money up front gives us the running room to get the project going and dedicate people to your job. “Why should we pay someone for work they haven’t done yet?” you ask. Excellent question. But let me remind you that you pay for flights when you reserve them, not when you get to your destination. You’re paying to reserve a limited resource: our time. Unlike an airline, we won’t ask you to pay for the entire flight when you reserve it

Look, you can get a website for $500. You can also get a website for $70 million. The former is gonna have less stuff on it than the latter. (Neither will necessarily trump the other. I’ve seen kickass $500 websites. I’ve also seen million-dollar budgets go down in flames.) Knowing how much money you’ve committed to a project helps a designer tailor solutions to that price point.

Experienced designers are more expensive. Designers who know how to handle convoluted problems cost more than designers who’ve solved easier problems. Complex problem solving is a skill that improves with practice. You benefit from all the mistakes they made in the past that they won’t repeat with you

The company that sent you a bid for $100K may have bid $80K if you’d shown up a month earlier. And the company that bid $250K may have bid $175K for a similarly complex job if you were a nonprofit rather than a luxury resort company. Estimates aren’t really a matter of whether you want to pay $50K or $100K, but whether you’re willing to pay that particular amount for that designer at this time. Honestly, nothing is more important than picking the right people to work with as you’re going to be spending a lot of time together. Choose who you want to work with first, and then decide whether you’ll pay them what they ask.

If the project is big enough, you may have a couple of payments due at agreed-upon milestones, with a final payment on completion. I advise designers to define completion as something within their control. For example, if your designers are delivering front-end code for your internal team to implement, completion should be defined as the delivery of final code, and not implementation or launch. Because those things are beyond the designer’s control. Should your implementation team be called away to put out a fire on another project, we can’t in good conscience have the design team waiting for them to get back to work on the original project to get paid.

Good design doesn’t stem from intuition, talent, or luck (although I’ll take a smidgen of each). It comes from research and understanding. We told the client this was a process that worked, one we stood by. We said the work in our portfolio—the work that made them approach us as potential partners—resulted from this process.

They politely listened, thanked us, and then hung up. I went back to looking for my next client, thinking that was the end of this one. And I was honestly amazed when they called back to offer us the job.

I’d love to tell you that our argument convinced them, but it hadn’t. The other two studios, who agreed to do initial concepts without any research, did. Their concepts were nothing close to what that client needed. How could they have been? Beware a designer who tells you they can solve your problem without doing the legwork of research. That’s not good design, it’s a magic trick. They’re either lying to you or themselves.

Once you’ve hired a designer you need to trust them to do their job. This is harder than it sounds.

Don’t stress about looking dumb in front of a designer. I guarantee they’re worried about the same thing. The sooner someone says, “I don’t know,” the quicker that becomes an acceptable thing to say. Ninety percent of the world’s problems come from someone afraid to admit they don’t know something. Be honest about whether you have experience with the type of project you’re working on. This applies to both clients and designers

The designer’s process is what made your designer successful enough that you decided to hire them. If that process worked for previous clients, it’s highly likely it’ll work for you too.

If you have information important to company strategy, like moving from a subscription model to an ad-based one, or even tangentially related to the project, like a re-org that could affect workflow, let your designer know. Every piece of information you withhold increases the project’s risk of failure.

A professional designer keeps their clients’ information confidential, whether they’ve signed a nondisclosure agreement or not. What they know about company strategy influences how they approach the job.

Let them explain these things. You may want to jump in and give your instant opinion. You may have a quick reaction to something they’re showing. Sit on your hands and let them finish telling you why they made the decisions they made.

The last thing you want is a team focused on whether you’ll like something or afraid to try something they believe will work because you’ve expressed a distaste for orange, photos, or the word potato.

Do you want your team focused on making you happy or making the project successful? Because those can be two very different things. A team afraid to do their best work because you may be unhappy doesn’t do you any favors. And you’re not doing them any favors by putting them in that position.

Discovery is so important, we won’t take a project at Mule if a client won’t do it. Research isn’t an optional phase of design; it’s the keystone under which everything else rests. Unless we take time to properly survey the landscape and approach our work with a solid understanding of the problem, everything we do is costly guesswork.

If you already have a clear idea of what you want to do, great, we’ll test those assumptions. Time we spend on research now saves you tenfold time down the line. Research isn’t a time-sink; it’s a profit center.

Your design team should ask you and your team questions: how you do your jobs, what your workflow’s like, and how to improve it. (A good design team often comes in to redesign your website and ends up reorganizing your company.) It’s in your best interest to give the design team access to the people they want to talk to. Remember, they work for you, and your secrets will remain their secrets.

No matter how great your designer is, they won’t ever be the expert in your business. You are. The designer is the expert in translating your message so other people understand it. They’re the expert in translating your business goals into something people use. But they need your help. Make sure your designer trusts your expertise as much as you trust theirs. Clearly delineate each of your responsibilities at the project’s start. Make sure this understanding extends to the rest of your team too.

Think of it this way: you’re cutting a bagel in the morning. The knife slips and suddenly you’re in the emergency room. It sucks. You’re freaked out, which is totally understandable since you’re bleeding. Which doctor are you gonna trust more? The one who freaks out along with you? Or the one who remains calm and acts like stitching on a thumb is a routine part of their job? That’s what you want in a designer too.

And if you don’t remain calm, that doctor may have to knock you out before they sew the thumb back on.

Let’s say you want an image-heavy site, but you don’t have a photographer or an image editor to maintain it. That’s a major constraint. So we ask if you’re willing to hire one. If you aren’t, we say we can’t design an image-heavy site. If you insist on seeing one anyway, we say no again, because we can’t propose a design solution you can’t sustain.

What do you have that people want? People visit your site for your content; your success hinges on how quickly they find it, how useful it is, and how enjoyable the experience is. Don’t underestimate how important a clear content strategy is to that success.

Information design identifies the unique templates that make up your site. What’s a template? Great question. For our purposes, a template is a page or screen type. For example, let’s say you run a shopping site. Your most obvious templates are a product page, category page, search results page, and shopping cart. If you run a news site, you probably have an article page and a section index

As we start to organize the site, our earlier research comes in handy. (It does that. I hope by now you’re convinced.) We look over what users said during the discovery phase and organize information in a way that makes sense to them. The words they used to describe things? We want to use those words. The way they told us they make decisions about buying shoes online? We wanna take that into account and make sure the site is built around how their heads work, not how your company is organized. Your users don’t care how your company is organized.

The goal of this phase is that you jump up in your chair and scream, “Yes! That’s it right there. Make it like that!” Be prepared for that moment to take a few iterations, which are normal parts of the process. A designer who nails something right out of the gate isn’t good—they’re lucky. A designer who works with you, listens to your feedback, pays attention to your users’ needs, and brings the work closer to the mark with each iteration is good. You don’t want to rely on luck. You want someone with a proven process that ensures you success time and again.

I’ll tell you a secret. I do most of my testing by grabbing people who’re on the way to the bathroom. I say, “Hey, can you look at this real quick?” They’re stressed out with a full bladder and don’t have time to putz around, which means they need to make a fast decision. They’re also less likely to be nice, because I’m keeping them from peeing

Some of the things you see will be right, some will be wrong. It’s important you tell me which is which. You can’t hurt my feelings—it’s part of the job. Your negative feedback is more valuable than your positive feedback. If you don’t speak up when something isn’t working, I won’t have a chance to fix it, which will cost us time and money we don’t have. Let’s promise to be totally, brutally honest with one another. Ready?

People ask why we named our company Mule Design. If you’re ever lucky enough to find yourself at the Grand Canyon—and the government hasn’t shut down again—ride a mule down to the bottom of the canyon. It’s quite lovely. The first time someone tried riding down, they were on a horse. Horses, however beautiful, are also stupid. Sorry. The horses jumped right to the bottom. (Everyone loves this story by the way.) So they tried mules. The mules made it safely all the way down. They’re sure-footed. They also have a reputation for being stubborn, but they’re not. They just refuse to take any action that isn’t in their best interest and, by extension, their rider’s best interest. If they feel the path is dangerous, they won’t do it. They resist and stop

When you ask your designer to do something and they ask why, they’re doing their job. The ensuing conversation is invaluable in helping them solve the problem correctly. The two of you can probably come up with a better solution than either of you could have done individually.

If you hire a designer to find a way to sell cheese online, and three-quarters of the way through the project you say, “We’re not going to sell cheese anymore. We’re going to be a video-sharing social network for dairy farmers. Can we stick to our original deadline?” the answer is no. The work that designer did, from the research on up, was geared toward a strategy that no longer exists. All of that work needs to happen again.

Challenging the designer’s work in the most productive way possible is the essence of being a client.

They come because the site fulfills a need, whether it’s a physical need (pants), an emotional need (cat slideshow), or a logistical need (airplane tickets). The design needs to support that content or function in ways that make its use clear, delightful, and memorable. The better design does those things, the more people will return to your site when they have that need or desire. When you evaluate design, think of the person having their need fulfilled. Can they do it? Can they do it in a manner they’ll enjoy?

Your personal tastes are not a success metric. This is a business! We’re going to evaluate the work based on whether it increases revenue, customer retention, or any other metrics we set up at the start. I don’t care if you hate green. If the research points to green making you buckets of money, we’re using it. I bet you’ll like green then.

Your designer needs to set the stage for you. Remember my speech about hope in the last chapter? (Go back and reread it if you don’t.) Every design presentation should start with some form of: “Here’s what we need your feedback on today.” That may be followed by the helpful: “Here’s what we’re not ready to talk about yet.” If your designer doesn’t tell you these things up front, feel free to ask. Sometimes they need a little help. Otherwise, you may find yourself spending thirty minutes discussing JavaScript functionality that isn’t slated to work for another three weeks.

When a designer puts something in front of you, especially if it’s technically tricky, evaluate the effect that piece of functionality has on your deadline. If you don’t know whether something is technically tricky, ask. Here’s a secret: they will always say no. But if it’s tricky, they’ll hesitate for a second before saying no. At which point, ask for an hourly estimate of how long it’ll take to build it. Then double the number and ask if there’s an easier way.

The correct order seems obvious in some cases, like buying a movie ticket. You decide what movie you want to see, find out where it’s playing, get a showtime, and buy a ticket. Unless you choose a movie based on what’s playing at a certain theater, in which case, you swap the first two steps. The system needs to work both ways. The order isn’t ever as obvious as you may think, because people are weird and wonderful and do things in all manner of ways.

Simplicity is the key to success—and the hardest thing to pull off in design. When you do manage the feat, it looks like you’ve done nothing! Because, oh my god, it’s so simple. Which is why the main ingredient of achieving simplicity is confidence. A good designer finds an elegant way to put everything you need on a page. A great designer convinces you that half that shit is unnecessary.

If you take something away and the site still meets its goals, you don’t need it. Burn it with fire. Let’s define what we mean by “need”: does it meet a major goal of the business or user? Is this the right place to meet that goal?

Your designer should be able to give you a reason why they made the decisions they did. They should tie those decisions back to your goals. That’s the logic you need to evaluate.

For example, “I’ve placed this ad so that it intersects the article body, thereby placing it within the reader’s reading flow and increasing the ad’s visibility and odds of the reader interacting with it.” That’s expert reasoning. It shows experience with reading models and business needs. “I put the ad here, because it fit.” Not so much.

A good client knows the difference between personal opinion and goal-driven, informed evaluation.

I realize this may be hard for you to hear, but I honestly don’t care whether you like what I do. (Don’t throw the book across the room yet. Stick with me.) Obviously, if you like something, my job is easier. But what I can’t do under any circumstances is make decisions based on whether you’ll like them, instead of whether they’ll succeed. And you honestly don’t want me to.

Good feedback relates back to goals and user needs. Bad feedback is subjective and prescriptive. For example, “There’s way too much going on here and the Add to Cart button gets lost,” is excellent feedback. It relates to the page’s goal, which is to apparently sell something, and communicates a problem to be solved, which is to get rid of the junk on the page. Avoid personal preferences like, “I hate scrolling.” I can do absolutely nothing with that statement. If research shows that your readers enjoy larger type and are comfortable scrolling, we’re scrolling. You’re not every reader. Building things to your own preferences makes one person happy: you. That’s not enough people to make your site a success.

If something isn’t working, point it out and go into as much detail as possible as to why. Tie it to the goals we agreed to earlier in the project. Understanding your reasoning is critical to solving the problem. Being told to do something a certain way, or worse, getting a comp of it done that way only means we have to reverse-engineer the whole thing and find out what you were trying to solve. Lost time. Lost budget.

Think of it this way. If a solution I came up with doesn’t properly address your business goal and you’re correcting me without saying why it’s wrong, I’m going to remain ignorant of what’s wrong. Which means I’m likely to keep doing it. Which means you’re going to have to keep correcting me. That’s a terrible way for you to spend your time.

You hired someone to fix a complex problem within a complex organization. They better have some questions. More important, they better feel comfortable enough to ask those questions. If your design team is running around asking people on your team, yourself included, all kinds of questions, they’re doing their job. That’s the sound of people getting the information they need. If your design team doesn’t have any questions, you’ve got a problem. That’s the sound of assumptions solidifying.

When a designer tells you about something gone wrong, take a deep breath. Count how lucky you are. You’ve hired people who’re willing to approach you about the problems they’re having or causing. This gives you an opportunity to address them. You can fix zero of the problems you don’t know about. You can fix some of the ones you do.

Also, pat yourself on the back for being the kind of person your team isn’t afraid of talking to about the hard stuff.

If someone’s complaining about legacy systems, that means they’re deep in the weeds about to start the most heinous job in web services. Dealing with legacy systems is like swimming through maple syrup. No one’s legacy systems are in good shape. They’ve been cobbled and duct-taped together for years. The previous redesign probably entailed a quick fix to avoid them altogether. But at some point someone has to descend into the sub-basement of your website and pull this stuff out, clean it up, and import it into shiny, new systems.

The people dealing with your legacy systems are like that person in horror movies who’s brave enough to go into the storm cellar by themselves

You know how I can tell when a project is going smoothly? When I see someone on my team and yours joking around on Twitter. Or going to lunch or getting a drink after work. These are signs that people get along and enjoy working with one another. Do you have to like each other to do good work together? No. You have to have respect. Absolutely. But man, it’s so much easier when people enjoy working together. They’re more open to other people’s ideas and more supportive. You don’t have weird ego crap. If someone screws up, they’re willing to say so.

If a designer shows you work in progress, it’s a great sign. It means they’ve moved beyond a fear that all you’ll see is the broken stuff to a willingness to collaborate with you. Look at it in the spirit of collaboration. Ask questions about what they’re showing. Talk about where they’re headed with it. Feel free to ask if there’s any feedback they’re looking for at the moment. They’ve accepted you as part of the team that solves the problem.

Before searching for someone new, take stock of what you’ve learned. Did you miss a red flag during hiring? Did the problem stem from the quality of the work or the relationship? Do you need someone with more experience? Or did you choose the cheapest option over someone more qualified because you wanted to save money? (Guess what? You didn’t save money. What you save on cost, you take on risk.)