Egos, clients and design. Wanna know our web designer’s opinions about the relationship between those three things?

Dear friend designer, I’m sure you’ve been through this.

SEE ALSO: WHY SHOULD WE WORK IN COLLABORATION WITH CLIENTS

As a designer, when I had a new project on the way, I fell in the trap of being “creative” and get right into photoshop pushing some pixels. In the meanwhile, I tried my best to make my work look as much great as I can. It was my goal to impress the client.

I was looking to get noticed and I thought that the thing that would get people’s attention was to build up a portfolio, but I was forgetting about the most important thing about design: it has solved real business problems as a way to improve people’s lives.

Since wasn’t noticing what I was missing out, as main result, I had to deal with unsatisfied clients. They would have a great looking website but at the same time a lack of user experience. Worse than that, I would put a lot of time and effort for…nothing.

As I was moving forward with my work, I’ve started to notice that design it’s not all about typography, colors and shapes – of course they play a big role in the design process, like defining if users will like or not – but we have to think about our final user.

We can have the most beautiful product – which people will enjoy – but have zero use for it, because they don’t know how to do it.

People make businesses grow – so if I wanted to change and grow as well, it was time to think about their problems (not mine, for once) and how could I solve them – this was the first step to get rid of my ego.

At the end of the day, you should provide services that solve people’s problems and make their life easier. Being honest, they’re paying us to do it, so the best we can do is to do it properly!

That’s why at Vitamina we are refining our design process.

DESIGN PROCESS

This design process was created to improve the communication between the team and the client and it’s divided into 5 steps – Discover, Explain, Ideate, Prototype and Test:

So, first of all, we try to get as much information as we can from our clients:

• Which type of business are they in?
• Which problem are we trying to solve?
• Who will be our final users?
• What can we do in order to make their life easier?
• In which context will they use the product that we are creating?

These are all questions we have to ask ourselves every time we start a new project. It will help us to get as much context and information as we can.

Get on your client’s shoes and make sure you both are on the same page.

With all the information, you will have a better understanding of the problem, and you will be able to find a better solution.

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

Thinking about our client will help us to understand them. If we want to find a way to get valuable we have to provide value to others.

SEE ALSO: WHY SHOULD WE WORK IN COLLABORATION WITH CLIENTS

When we create something thinking about who is on the other side while we blend the client in the process – our solution will increase user experience.

Ultimately, it is a win-win situation. Clients pay us to solve problems, to work with them and care about their concerns, not just to build up beautiful products, it will help us go further and create a better relationship for both ways.