[Convincing Clients Without (Much) Bravado - Mindy Wagner - Blend Conference 2013] 0:00 [Mindy Wagner] I'm going to talk to you about selling design without bravado. 0:05 But first I'll just give you a really quick intro because I'm probably a stranger. 0:09 I'm Mindy, and I go by "Graphics Girl" and you might have seen me tweeting or blogging somewhat infrequently on Viget's Inspire blog. 0:14 I live and work in Durham. I work at Viget, which is a design agency there. 0:26 We also have offices in Falls Church and Boulder. I'm a senior designer. I've been there about 5 years. 0:31 I don't have a southern accent because I actually come from New York—and the not cool part of New York, 0:38 but the very, very snowy part which is why I'm not there now. 0:43 Shoveling your driveway in April is just not awesome. 0:47 I started my career a very long time ago. In fact, I can honestly say that my first—this isn't mine. 0:53 I, unfortunately, don't have a screenshot of my first website, but it was in Geocities and it did have a snakeskin background. 0:58 So, yeah. Luckily now I get to do somewhat cooler work for somewhat cooler clients. 1:07 I work on a lot of different projects at Viget. So sometimes I'm working with really big brands and nice, healthy timelines and budgets. 1:15 And it might go 6 months. 1:22 Sometimes I'm working on a 2-week sprint for a demo start up or an internal project for the boss. 1:24 So I really get to run the gambit on client persuasion, conversations 1:32 and the types of obstacles that you run into at all these different levels of things. 1:36 So what I'm going to talk about is selling your design without much bravado. 1:43 And when I say sell I mean present, pitch, win, get your design through somewhat unscathed through that whole obstacle course. 1:47 When I say bravado I mean swagger. I don't have this thing—the ego and tough-talk persona. 1:56 I think there's definitely a myth—or some people can obviously do this. 2:06 I cannot be this person—the creative genius that walks in, throws out 1 idea and says, 2:12 "This is the idea. I am the best. You have to believe me." And then walks away. 2:19 It doesn't come naturally to me. When I try to fake it, it looks extremely awkward and weird, so I've given up. I've accepted. 2:23 But whether or not I have bravado, I have to be able to tell clients when they don't know shit. [laughter] 2:32 And it's really hard for me because I am anti-conflict by nature. I don't like having tough conversations, and I don't have that bravado. 2:40 So I've developed—I've been doing this over 10 years. 2:50 And in those 10 years I've worked really hard to develop enough of a system around my weaknesses to turn them into strengths. 2:53 So the path to my self-acceptance—there was a turning point in my career that really helped me out. 3:03 About 5 years ago, which is about more than 5 years of my career, I was working as an internal designer at Syracuse University. 3:11 And I worked there for quite awhile. So I worked my way up; everybody trusted me. 3:19 I got to be in on some somewhat interesting things if you work at a university. I got to be part of the committee. 3:23 And any university committee is sort of like a torture chamber. 3:31 But this one happened to be the committee to pick the vendor for the university-wide redesign. 3:34 I didn't want to be a part of the university-wide redesign team; 3:40 I wanted to be part of the committee because internally there was no way we were going to get the job done. 3:45 So we really pushed for a vendor. They agreed. They let us have this—they paid a lot of money for vendors to come in. 3:50 So I got to be a fly on the wall in the opposite side of the conversation. 3:56 I got to sit in the client's seat and watch presentations from, I think there were 6 different major design firms that came through 4:01 from New York City and Chicago and Philly. 4:09 And at this point in my career, I had not seen real-deal pitches of this level, and I was blown away. 4:12 I was also surprised by the personality that was being brought by a lot of these people. 4:19 It did sort of feel like, "Okay, either they're geniuses or they're really big jerks." 4:29 And I felt somewhat defeated because I was surprised that this was working. 4:34 I was seeing what they were saying, and I was hearing these really wild assumptions 4:46 about things we could do and technologies we would use. 4:49 And I was like, "There's no way this is ever going to work." But it was working for the committee. 4:52 My committee was really excited about this razzle-dazzle personality. 4:58 And then there was this other guy that came through, and he was much different from that show-flash ego. 5:04 He wasn't buzzworthy, but when he did his presentation and left there was no, "Ooh, that guy. Let's do that." 5:13 But he also wasn't crazy, and he didn't come across as temperamental. 5:20 So as the conversation started about pros and cons, that put him above about half the people immediately. 5:24 I was starting to feel a little better. 5:32 And then I sat back and listened because I didn't want to be the one choosing this team; I just wanted to help facilitate the conversation. 5:35 But I watched the tide turn from, "Ooh, that really buzz-worthy person with all the great lingo and the really flashy personality 5:43 and the shiny shoes—they were awesome, " to, "This guy might actually listen to us, and he's going to work hard. 5:49 So I watched the designer that I knew I couldn't be, they slowly turned to the designer that I could learn to be. 5:56 I could learn to be this guy who could communicate well and be articulate and who could collaborate and listen 6:06 and someone—in the end, they felt like they could trust him. 6:12 So some of that swagger actually worked against those other designers in the end. 6:16 So I learned that what I needed to do was play to my strengths and not try to be the designer that I'm not. 6:23 I don't enter to metal music, for instance. 6:29 If you meet me, you'll know that would look totally out of context and I wouldn't be able to pull it off, and so I'm not going to try. 6:34 Instead I have a much more subtle, collaborative approach. 6:43 But over 10 years I've found that that works better for me than brute force. 6:47 So I'm going to talk about the different stages and how at those different stages we can basically get the buy-in that we're looking for— 6:52 smooth our transitions, smooth those conversations, get our work through even at some difficult obstacle points. 7:00 And the most important part to me is before any design ever gets laid down—including mood boards—before any visual whatsoever, 7:06 and sometimes even before we're talking to them. 7:15 The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it. I really like this quote. I haven't read the book. I know he's a cool guy. 7:18 The idea that—this is sort of how I function is like, "If I can smooth this path, if I can anticipate the problems that we might have 7:26 and get rid of them before they ever come up, then I'm just going to have a much smoother path along the way." 7:37 And that's ultimately what I'm looking for to get my designs through. 7:42 We naturally associate confidence with expertise and we all do this and we've all been wrong about it and realize that, 7:46 "Oh, this guy that was so confident, I thought he was going to be great at what he did, and he's actually horrible." 7:53 Or, "This really insecure person that's quiet, in the corner and seems like they're probably going nowhere, 7:59 they're like the smartest person in the room." 8:04 So we've all made this assumption wrongly. 8:06 But our clients don't have time to assess out whether or not our insecurities are due to bad high-school years or bad work. 8:10 So we have to give them the confidence in the beginning—as much as we can—so that they feel good about us and they don't have to take— 8:18 especially if they get—our work runs very quickly. 8:25 If I lose a client and in week 1, I don't have months to get that confidence back. So I really have to get it right early in the project. 8:29 So how do you do that if you don't have natural swagger? How do you gain their confidence? 8:39 This is by far where I spend the most time—in a creepy, manipulative way. [laughter] 8:46 When I say stalk them, the minute I know who my next client is, whether it's a 2-week sprint or a 6-month project, 8:55 I go and I track down all of the stuff that they sent us. 9:04 This is the thing I used to skip. I would wait for project managers to send me the valid information that I should know. 9:08 Now I just go find it. I go find all the documents—anything we've sent them, anything they've sent us. 9:13 I look at site, of course—if it exists. I try to dig up past and current marketing campaigns. 9:18 A lot of times clients don't share that stuff with us, but it's really, really informative. 9:25 And if you go into the meeting having done that leg work, you're just going to sound much more informed when you talk to them. 9:30 Of course look up peers and competitors. 9:36 If they haven't given you a list, make sure you make up your own list, and be able to talk to a couple of things in each of those sites 9:37 or each of those campaigns that you feel like is good, bad, whatever. 9:46 And then most creepy but also most helpful, if I know who's going to be at a kickoff meeting if I haven't met the team before, 9:49 I go and I look up as much as I can about them. 9:57 So I go to their LinkedIn profiles and I figure out not only what they do at the company they're at now, 9:59 but what they did prior—anything in their past that might me helpful to help me to figure out how they tick. 10:04 And I get granular. 10:11 So if I can't find somebody's LinkedIn profile and I can't find interviews with them and I can't find the kind of information I'm looking for, 10:13 I'm willing to look at Pinterest boards. 10:19 I've looked at anything I can find to get into that room and feel like I have some idea who this person is, 10:21 because even if I don't use that information at all and even if it's not really helpful, I feel better when I'm sitting in that room with them. 10:28 I feel like they're not strangers. 10:36 I've talked to as many of you as I can before this talk because it makes me feel like, 10:38 "Okay. I know that person a little bit. I know this person a little bit." 10:41 I have some basis for what the crowd is like. 10:44 This is a thing I think we tend to skip. 10:49 We talk a lot about deliverables and we talk a lot about process and we talk a lot about pieces and things like that, 10:52 but we are hesitant to talk about our philosophy and our design approach in the bigger, big D design. 10:58 And I think that's a huge mistake on our part. I think that we are setting ourselves up to be pencil pushers instead of designers. 11:07 So I do this quickly and I don't get poetic about it, but I do always put in a few slides 11:14 or just have a quick conversation about how I approach design from a philosophical view point 11:23 and how I think that's going to make their project awesome. 11:28 And to me I think partly we're still just partly getting over that little brother design thing, but I've been doing this now for, 11:31 as I said, over a decade. 11:39 So I can have this conversation and I should have this conversation with people 11:42 and make sure that I set the tone as creative person, not as decorator. 11:46 It's very easy for clients to see us as decorators if we don't have this kind of conversation. 11:51 Another thing I do and try to figure out really early on is what their lens is on the design or the project or whatever task we're doing for them— 11:59 what it is they're focused on, because it's not just the goal. 12:08 And a lot of times our goal and their goals aren't always the same. 12:11 Sometimes the lens is—well it's got to be easy to maintain because holy crap, we're going to be stuck with this thing. 12:15 That's often times a lens, and so speaking to that lens throughout all of the parts of the process makes everybody feel better, 12:20 even if you know that's not the main point and even if you know that's not the main goal—just being able to put it into context. 12:26 Another lens that often comes up is the CEO needs to be happy or whatever. 12:34 This is an example of a project that I worked on where this company sold school books, 12:38 and they basically had 2 totally different sites for school books, but they were the same site; we were going to skin them. 12:45 They sold regular school books and then they sold religious school books. 12:51 And they were really hung up on how we were going to translate 1 of these designs. 12:56 We were going to do 1 design first and then translate it later into this religious site. 13:01 And they were really hung up on how we would do that. 13:05 We knew that was really easy and I could have easily just been like, "Yeah, yeah. We got it." 13:08 Instead I took about 2 hours in the mood board phase—so this is the regular school-book design. 13:12 I took another 2 hours and skinned for them the mood board to show them that, 13:18 "Hey this religious site, we've got it. There's no problem. We understand what you're looking for. We will get to it. 13:22 We know it's a couple months down the line. No big deal." 13:30 And that couple hours basically shut down hours of conversation we would have had around each step of the design 13:33 if we hadn't shown them that we totally understood that lens and we could work with it. 13:40 The last thing I'd like to do before comps is—again, maybe sort of creepy, sort of manipulative thing, but it really works— 13:47 and that's to plant seeds for whatever it is you know you want to do next. 13:55 So a lot of times in kickoffs or in those first meetings you have something in your head, something you're kicking around. 13:59 You've talked with your team, hopefully. You guys are starting to get to little bits of ideas. 14:06 Or you might know that you want to use a certain technology or you might what to do a certain cool interaction 14:12 that you think you could fit into the project. 14:17 I plant the seeds for those as early as possible and just try to make it seem like they were along for that decision, 14:20 that it wasn't made without them way before they got into the project or when you went off with your office. 14:27 But if you can come around to those in meetings, that works out great. And I'll get to an example of that. 14:32 I worked on Upenn.edu. I was the senior designer and actually only designer. I don't know why that matters. 14:40 And when I got them as a client I first of all realized they're an Ivy League school. 14:49 I did not go to an Ivy League school so I had to learn who all the Ivys were and why that mattered and how old they were and all this. 14:55 They were founded by Ben Franklin, so I really got to know a 10th-grade version of Ben Franklin 15:03 so that I knew why there were 10 statues of him on campus and how important he was to them. 15:09 I looked at all their sites. And having come from a university world, I knew there was going to be tons of sites. 15:15 But I looked at the important ones and the ones I knew were possibly going to come up in meetings 15:20 and also things that were done well and things that were done really poorly so we could have this conversation about the environment 15:26 and who's going off the ranch and why and how maybe we could fix that kind of stuff. 15:32 This is our pre-mood board exercise that we don't always do but occasionally do. 15:38 We call them moodlets for lack of—it's a horrible name, but that's the only name we've come up with. 15:44 So before the kickoff I had a couple extra hours, so I sat down and I basically—having done all this early research, 15:49 I could kind of frame up 3 concepts. 15:55 So gave each concept a name and I gave it a little bit of a visual direction idea and I gave it a couple of adjectives, 15:58 and I just kind of set this aside. 16:04 It was just a thing I did as an exercise to be prepared for that meeting. 16:06 We went to Philly, we ate lots of pretzels—lots of pretzels. I never got a Philly cheese steak, but I ate like 5 pretzels in 1 day. 16:10 Then we went to the kickoff, and we spent all day with their team there. 16:19 And then while the other parts of my team—the UEX and the FED and the sales and project management were going on, 16:24 I was sitting in the corner writing things on post-it notes looking a little bit crazy. 16:30 But what I was doing was writing down adjectives that the clients were saying throughout the meeting, 16:34 things they said about the university. 16:39 So when it was my turn to go, this was where I was doing the planting seeds part. 16:41 I asked them to put it in 3 buckets, we were able to frame those words up into 3 bucketed concepts, 16:46 and lo and behold they fit the names of my moodlet concepts, which no one had ever seen. 16:52 So I could lead them into these 3 concepts I knew I wanted to go with and make it seem like it was a team approach, 16:57 make it seem like we were all a family together. 17:04 And I wasn't lying. Those words had already come up in my research. 17:07 I knew these words were going to come out. I knew what directions we were going to end up with. 17:11 So it wasn't extremely slimy—it's a little slimy, but it's not terrible. [laughter] 17:14 And what happens then is we get to mood boards and they feel like they've been really, really involved in this process. 17:19 We do the 3 mood boards based on the 3 concepts. They love them. 17:27 We basically built that foundation, so the rest of the project went really smoothly. 17:30 This is like the craziest mood board. When I put this in I'm like, "Yeah, this is really Ben Franklin." 17:34 Clearly they didn't go with that one, but somebody had a lot of fun on that one. 17:40 So those are the things that I try to do before comps to set myself up. 17:47 When I get to actually—when I say comps I mean mood boards, I mean whatever your design deliverables are. 17:52 And if you're not a designer, hopefully these same principles apply. 17:58 When it comes to sharing design there's the regular stuff we always do, but there's some other stuff that I think we should keep in mind 18:03 to make our approach a little bit better. 18:10 One of them is to avoid dogmatic approaches. 18:13 I think we've all gotten really used to certain deliverables like style tiles or mood boards or style guides—these types of deliverables— 18:17 and they're written into task orders. 18:26 So we're handed the direective of, "Here's the things you're going to do." 18:28 And more and more I'm finding that that approach—we're pushing back and sales is listening and we're saying, 18:33 "We don't want labels on what it is we're stuck with." 18:39 But a lot of times a client wants a label. Someone asked earlier in an earlier talk, "When a client forces 3 mood boards, what do you do?" 18:43 You let it go in sales and then when you get to the design phase you ask them, 18:51 "Can I change this? Can I do something that makes more sense for you guys? Can I stop wasting your time? 18:55 Can I do something that's more efficient or that's a better fit for the project?" 19:00 So an example of where I just went off approach, I got to work with TimeLife.com of the like 3 am infomercial of TimeLIfe.com, 19:04 which was awesome. 19:13 Everybody else was like, "That's so cheesy." I was like, "No, I love it. Send me some box sets now." I have box sets at my desk. 19:15 So one of the challenges with Time Life was that this is just a small sampling of their visual design for their products. 19:26 Their products are all over the map and very, very strong visually and very different visually. 19:33 Each one just had a totally different look and feel. So I knew that the UI for this site was going to be very minimal. 19:38 It was going to just—I wanted to basically disappear. 19:44 Another challenge was that we were going to hand the site off to internal designers at Time Life, 19:48 and they wanted the product pages to look really customized per product. 19:54 But what the Time Life team was doing basically now was something like this. 19:58 So their skill level was such that we didn't really want to drown them with some type of really complicated template 20:02 or really complicated graphics that they would have to create and maintain. 20:08 We didn't want to give them this huge overhead. 20:12 So I kind of sat on it for a couple of days and I looked around at what they were doing and what I could do, and I thought about these mood boards. 20:14 At the time we were supposed to do 3 mood boards. 20:22 I was like, "I'm not feeling that." So I talked to the team at Time Life. 20:24 I said, "Hey guys. I want to take a different approach. I just want to bring in a design exploration to the next meeting. 20:30 If you hate it, we can go back to mood boards. But let me take this." 20:35 I've done this on a number of client projects. 20:38 It's always hard for me to do because I feel like, "Oh but they think they're getting this thing. 20:40 This is bending the rules, and I don't break rules. I'm a rule follower." 20:45 But I've never had anyone say no because at this early stage they're really ready to throw in and see what you can do. 20:49 So this is a great place to get off the—if you're going to go off track, this is a great starting point. 20:56 I brought to them this, which basically there's a really simple, dark wrapper. 21:04 It's hard to see on the screen that there's even anything there. 21:10 Dark wrapper and a concept that, "Hey, these CD covers are so strong, you don't really need much else. 21:13 But let's give it 1 background image and these CD covers." 21:18 And I showed it to them in a couple of variations. 21:21 These were really fun to make. I got to do the whole site, and I think I made 200 of these things. 21:24 They were awesome—just like churning away all day. 21:29 They loved this. They loved the idea. They loved the fact that they could maintain it. They didn't need mood boards. 21:33 They didn't need to look at different styles. 21:40 So it was fun to impress them with this, and it immediately went into the design. 21:42 So what ended up being the final design was something very, very similar to what I started with, which was cool. 21:48 It was really nice to see there wasn't a lot of waste on this project and my vision was executed exactly the way that I had intended. 21:54 So this is the home page, and this is the product page for an awesome disco box set. If anyone needs one later, I have it. 22:02 It's basically one-to-one. The top area, though, UEX changed it a little bit, but the design basically carried straight in. 22:11 A problem I have with a designer without that bravado thing, is that when I input really early on like,"it has to be easy to maintain," 22:21 or "it has to be green because green is my Mom's favorite color," or whatever, I take those things really seriously 22:30 and I start to let them box me in. 22:35 So I've got this long list by the second or third meeting of all these things that I think they need—that they've said they need. 22:38 But 10 different people might have said 10 different things, and they may have only meant it in passing. 22:45 It's really hard to figure out just how important those things are to them 22:50 and how important it is versus the trade-off that you're going to have to make if you do that thing. 22:55 So I've made some mistakes. This is Ashley Furniture, and they were a project I worked on awhile ago. 23:00 And they hemmed us in pretty good in the beginning. 23:08 They were very scared of maintenance, they wanted certain pictures, they wanted boxes. 23:11 They had what they thought was a vision, and I executed on that vision. 23:17 And I let myself deliver something that I wasn't really that excited about and that I didn't feel like was a great solution. 23:22 So when I went into that first presentation with this comp, I wasn't excited but I thought,"Well, this is what they're asking for." 23:30 It turns out they weren't excited either because while this was what they had asked for on paper, this wasn't what they actually wanted. 23:36 They had bought into our design work based on our portfolio, and they wanted that work. 23:44 They didn't really understand that the things they were saying were basically a trade-off to what they would get. 23:50 So we went 7 rounds on a homepage—7 really difficult rounds to get to something they approved. 23:56 I don't even know if they were—I think they were happy in the end, but it was a really, really tough process. 24:04 And it need to go that way. 24:09 What I should have done and what I know now is I should have delivered something that was awesome and hard to maintain 24:11 and not hemmed in the beginning, and let them tell me to take it down to the thing that they want. 24:17 Not that I'm going to make them something they can't ever maintain, but this turned out to be a great compromise. 24:24 There's only a couple images on here that they actually have to do much Photoshop work to. 24:29 And they were willing to do that when they saw it. 24:33 If I had just made that compromise in the beginning, I wouldn't have had to go 7 rounds to get to it. 24:35 So the next project I had was like the complete opposite. This was 2-week sprint; Ashley was like, I don't know, 6 or 8 months. 24:42 Beat Deck was a 2-week sprint with a Y Combinator group—2 guys basically in a basement in San Fransisco. 24:50 When they came to me they were making sound cloud with music analytics, basically is what Beat Deck is. 24:57 Their target audience, for the most part, was going to be electronic dance music people, so ravers—like really young ravers. 25:04 If you're a really young raver, you probably call it something different. I'm from a totally different generation. 25:12 So that was their target audience, but they brought to me all these examples and all this inspiration that was basically really plain, 25:20 really drag, sort of like Apple.com—gray, white, whatever. 25:28 And they were like, "Yeah, this is how we want it to look." 25:32 I remember sitting at my desk and being like, "I have 2 weeks to get this done. I don't have time to churn on stuff. 25:35 If it doesn't go well in this first presentation, I'm going to be here late trying to figure this out." 25:41 But I don't really feel like what they're asking for is right. 25:47 I had just gotten done with Ashley and I thought, "I'm going to do it. I'm going to do what I think they should have." 25:50 I gave them a much punchier pallet and a little bit bolder treatment and also did all the UEX on this because their was no UEX designer. 25:56 So it was me and a project manager flying through this project. 26:05 This was the first comp I delivered, and I don't think it was what they expected but they were really excited and happy 26:11 and loved the idea and thought that this color pallet was great and that it would stand out from the rest of the competition. 26:18 So I won that one, and I was able to really move through that project quickly and successfully and get them way more comps 26:24 than we thought we would because we hit the nail on the head the first time, and I felt like going with my gut 26:33 was absolutely the right approach there. 26:38 That's just another comp. 26:41 I write myself scripts because I kind of babble and I kind of get off track. I forget things things that I want to say. 26:47 I don't have a great short-term memory, so before a big meeting a lot times—or even a small meeting— 26:55 I'll take between 5 and 15 minutes to give myself an outline and write down all the things I want to say. 27:00 This is an actual document that I had written up about questions I need to ask people and things I really want to clarify 27:08 and basically my agenda for the meeting. 27:16 We might have a totally separate agenda that talks about all the other people's parts, but this is me; this is what I want to say. 27:18 I don't usually refer to this once I'm in the meeting. Sometimes I print it out just so I have it on hand and I can take notes. 27:25 But most of the time this disappears and it's sort of an artifact, but I've organized what I want to ask. 27:30 It's like taking notes in high school. You might not ever look at them again, but the act of just thinking through that thing is really valuable. 27:38 A lot of times it does help me to clarify what the big problems are that are going on 27:45 or what the little problems are that are going on that we've been ignoring, maybe. 27:51 So the third section I'm going to talk about is the feedback loop. And this is the hardest section, clearly, to be good at. 27:56 It takes a lot of strategy and it takes a lot of smoothing of things, I think. 28:06 The longer that I watch great designers, the more I think handling feedback is one of the hardest skills to learn— 28:14 to be able to take it and then put out and skirt right around it to the thing that you actually want to do.—not because you want to do it, 28:22 but because it's the right thing. 28:31 I don't ever recommend designer bulldozing. 28:33 One of the things that I try to make sure I do now is to teach my clients how and when I want feedback—at each meeting; constantly. 28:37 I feel like sometimes I'm talking to children because I keep reiterating and I feel bad when I do that, but it is very effective. 28:46 What we forget because we're living and breathing these projects, what we forget is these people go off and don't think about it for 2 weeks. 28:56 They don't remember the decisions they made. 29:02 We are marinating in them, and they are off doing the thousand other things that are calling their attention. 29:04 So teaching them how we give feedback—one of the first things in every meeting,—and I was talking earler about this— 29:13 it's sort of the soap-opera recap. 29:20 If any of you have ever watched soap operas, the first 3-5 minutes are basically, here's all the stuff that happened before. 29:22 So if you haven't been in in 2 weeks, you can still watch. 29:28 And that's what I do at these meetings because people are coming in and out of meetings, they are not paying attention, 29:32 they are not reading things coming through email or base camp. 29:38 So setting yourself up for, "Here's all the decisions that we made last time." 29:41 or "Here's why we're going to look at what we're going to look at." is really, really valuable. 29:45 Sometimes it feels childish, but I don't think it does to them. I've never had a client say, "Stop repeating this stuff." 29:49 I've only ever gotten good feedback about that. 29:57 Clarifying what's up for evaluation is important. 30:02 If you just open the screen and you're showing them whatever it is you're showing them and you're not telling them what you want to hear, 30:05 they're going to give you feedback that's all over the map, and you're going to be frustrated. 30:11 You're going to be like, "I don't get why they're focusing on this one little thing? Who cares? They've seen it 10 times." 30:13 But you didn't tell them what you wanted them to look at. 30:19 So tell what it is you want them to look at, and tell them what type of feedback you want on that thing. 30:21 So if I'm showing a mood board, the first thing that I say is, "I want your gut reaction. 30:28 "You can tell me the other stuff. You can tell me what button you like and why the gradient's great on that. 30:33 But what I really want is just that big picture view." 30:38 If we're looking at round 7 on the homepage on Ashley, my conversations like, 30:42 "Hey guys, we need to decide on this headline and this picture here." 30:46 And I give them very pointed places to insert themselves because I think a lot the times, 30:51 clients have no idea where they should insert themselves or on what. 30:57 So they're searching for like, "Okay, well what can I say about this?" 31:03 Then you're going to get somewhat useless and all over the map feedback. 31:06 Digging for clarity is a thing that I used to not do, and then I'd get frustrated afterwards that I hadn't done it. 31:12 So when I hear feedback that doesn't make sense or that is really high level or that is just maybe random feeling, 31:19 I ask a lot of questions because I don't want to leave the meeting and be talking with another designer and say, 31:28 "Oh yeah, they said I couldn't use green," and have that designer go, "Why?" and then be like, "Actually I have no idea." 31:36 So I want to know the answers to the reasons that I'm changing something. 31:43 And then I might have a way better solution than they do or at least a better idea of what they think the problems are with those things. 31:46 So instead of just sitting there and writing all the feedback, make sure you're a part of this conversation. 31:55 I know sometimes designers are in between and not in these conversations, but you should be really trying to force yourself in 31:59 so you're getting the feedback firsthand and not through a project manager or somebody else who can't ask those questions for you. 32:06 Responding with authority is, again, I'm not awesome at authority or at like, "I know this, so do this." 32:15 But I work hard to—when I'm getting feedback that's about something in my area of expertise, especially when it's a detailed thing, 32:27 like recently I had a client—I don't want to say bullying—but really worried about the text size. 32:36 And I knew why the text size was the way it was and I knew all of the decision making that went into that 32:45 and the expertise that went into that, but they were just bound and determined it was going to be a different way. 32:51 So I kind of butted heads in a really polite way for a number of conversations over this point and eventually won. 32:57 I don't like to be bullied on things where I am the subject matter expert. 33:08 If we're talking about business schools or something like that, I'm totally open to critique. 33:12 But if we're talking about very specific design principles, that's where I step in and try to bring that authoritative personality. 33:18 But I always try to do it without getting defensive, and that's a hard thing to do, too, 33:28 when you're hearing negative feedback and you think it's silly and you think, "These people have no idea what they're talking about." 33:32 It's really easy to get emotional about it, and the minute you get emotional they stop listening because you've become the designer 33:40 that is heart-and-soul tied to this color or tied to this thing or tied to this picture. 33:47 You are no longer the expert; you are just a person with an opinion. 33:54 And everyone in the room is a person with an opinion so you just lost your edge. 33:58 So trying to do it without defensiveness is really important. 34:02 If all else fails—this is the only—see, I do get metal for like 3 seconds. [laughter] I forgot about this. 34:07 I made this for a co-worker of mine. We were in a project where there were more stakeholders than you could ever imagine. 34:14 So we were having some difficulty getting even the smallest of things through. 34:23 So when it get's to that point—when you know you're making the right decisions but you can't win them over with just a conversation 34:28 and when they can't win the next person over with just a conversation, annotations are the way to go. 34:34 It feels awful to do these types of things, but this is my font size chart and it took an hour or maybe 2 hours to go look at all their competitors 34:41 and look at their font size and line them all up in a chart and show them, "Hey guys, it's totally cool. We're fine. Everything's fine." 34:50 So that's what I did— I shut off the conversation. 34:58 It doesn't feel good to have to do these things, but it's part of our job to get the right solution through. 35:02 And if we had changed what they wanted to change, we would have been giving them a worse solution, 35:08 so I needed to solve the problem for them. 35:13 This is another calculator. 35:16 When you get to the type of people for which this works, just throw it at them as much as you can 35:19 because it's going to save you time in the end. 35:24 Empathizing with their fears I think can be difficult because we are in such totally different roles in the project, 35:29 so we're trying to make the best possible solution and they're trying to deal with all the politics and all the emotions and all the history 35:37 and all the baggage on the other end. 35:45 And that's hard. I've been working with Lansinoh, and they make baby and mom stuff. 35:47 If you have a baby, you've probably had a bottle of Lansinoh product in your house and you probably recognize this horrible, horrible purple, 35:53 which is their brand color. 36:01 When they came to us—this was their current site, so you can see why they're with us. 36:03 When they came to us they said, "Yeah, we know the purple's too much. We get it. 36:09 We know we look really dated. We have to drop the purple or at least go way less heavy with it. We're ready to do that. We're on board." 36:15 So we're like, "Oh awesome, we're not going to have to have this horrible conversation. This is going to be awesome. " 36:22 They wanted something really—all the words that came across whenever we talked were like modern, bright, weight space, open, 36:28 blah, blah, blah. 36:34 So this was the still fairly purple, in my opinion, comps that we started with. 36:36 They loved the comp, and we went on to design a number of other pages before we had the purple panic, and they just got nervous. 36:42 They started looking at all the other stuff that they had been putting out, and they were worried that people 36:54 would get to Lansinoh.com having gone there, typing Lansinoh on the computer and yet not really feel Lansionh-ish when they got there. 36:59 But one of the reasons they went here is because they have 3 other brands under this, none of which are purple. 37:08 So we knew that purple was not actually going to be the best choice for them. 37:13 We would, yes, lead with a purple tone, but we didn't want too much of that heavy-handedness. 37:16 It's hard to see in here, but what I ended up doing was saying, 37:25 "Okay guys, we can do this. We'll show you a couple of different things. We'll lead you through this and see what feels right to you." 37:29 We showed them a purple background with—their products have these goofy flowers on them, 37:36 and every woman that I talked to hated these horrible, goofy flowers, so I was really not interested in leaving them on. 37:44 But I showed them this option and I was pretty honest and I was like, 37:51 "Guys, the flowers are pretty bad, but if you want to, here's what it'll look like. We can do that. 37:55 And here's what it looks like just plain purple without the flowers. It's okay; it feels kind of heavy; it loses all that openness." 37:59 I gave them some reasons why I didn't think this was the right approach. 38:06 Then I showed them again the original comp, and I said, "Your products—"and if you look at, this is a category page. 38:10 But if you look at the product page, their products are just all the same color. They're all purple with teal. 38:16 There was no way anyone was going to mistake that they were on the Lansinoh site. 38:21 So leading them through that exercise and empathizing with them and letting them know we understood 38:25 and that we were willing to go in that direction if they really needed to was all we needed to do to get through the purple panic. 38:31 So we ended up going with exactly the same comp that we started with and just spending a couple hours 38:37 riffing through the other options for them. 38:44 The last thing that I'm going to address and only somewhat briefly because you could talk about this all day is prescriptive feedback. 38:48 This is the worst kind of feedback in the feedback loop, and it happens all the time. 38:56 When I say prescriptive I mean, "Change that button to orange," instead of, "That button needs to stand out more." 39:02 My feathers get ruffled when I hear this kind of stuff in meetings because I want to be the one helping make that decision. 39:08 I don't want someone coming in and deciding that for me. 39:16 So I have a couple of tricks for when that starts to come out—and the minute it starts to come out, 39:21 because if you let it go for a few meetings, then it starts to build and it starts to pile up. 39:26 It's a slippery slope that if you allow, it will just constantly build. 39:32 One of the things that I like to stop people and say is, "It sounds like the problem that you're trying to solve is—" whatever the problem is— 39:39 whatever you think the problem is. 39:48 And at that point they can tell you, "No, that's not the problem. Actually the problem that I'm having is this other thing." 39:50 But you've changed the conversation from solution to problem, and that's what you guys want to be talking about 39:55 when you're hearing feedback. 40:01 And then I don't ever throw out a solution in the meeting because that hems you in. 40:04 So you might, in the back of your mind, immediately know, "Oh yeah, this is what I would do." 40:10 But one of the things about this is sometimes prescriptive feedback comes in and goes away as quickly as it came in. 40:14 When it comes time to make revisions, that may totally fall off and not be important. 40:22 It might have been 1 person's feeling or the saying that they felt like in that moment but later come back and they're like, 40:26 "I'm not really worried about that." 40:32 So that's 1 reason I don't give solutions. 40:35 The other is I really want to think about what my solution is going to be before I just throw something out. 40:37 And I want them to feel like it's not this [snap, snap, snap], "Oh yeah, psh, psh, psh," 40:41 that it is a bigger design and holistic thought process that goes into these types of decisions. 40:45 The last trick that I go through—and this happens a lot in the prescriptive feedback description— 40:54 is what I call the "This or That Approach." 41:01 This is one of my favorite tricks for somewhat more difficult, annoying little feedback bits that maybe you're going 'round and 'round on. 41:03 I try to give 2 options that I can live with, and only 2 because more than that seems just muddy conversation. 41:13 So 2 fairly specific changes—either the header's bold or it's 4 pixel sizes larger or whatever. 41:19 Giving little points of choice, because most of us have stopped giving 3 homepages to decide on, 41:28 so they're losing a lot of choice already in that we've all narrowed our process down to maybe choosing a mood board 41:35 but not choosing a homepage and that kind of thing. 41:43 So giving these kinds of points along the way can really be helpful. 41:46 It heads off power struggles with everyone. So this technique works well in client meetings. It also works really well with toddlers. 41:49 It also works really well with significant others. 41:58 I have found that instead of saying, "I need help," you can say, 42:03 "Could you do this or could you do that—one of these things, will you choose this thing for me?" 42:07 So it's a technique I use a lot and I find it really, really helpful. I would suggest trying it everywhere. 42:12 And last but not least, hopefully this doesn't happen, but if and when the feedback loop gets awkward, 42:21 if you feel like you're losing their trust or if you feel like they're getting frustrated and you don't know why or you can't solve it, 42:29 you have to have the conversation with them—the really awkward, painful conversation of like, 42:35 "It seems like you guys kind of hate us and we don't really know why you hate us, but let's talk about it. 42:40 What about this process isn't working and how can we fix it?" 42:44 A lot of times the temptation, especially since we communicate mostly on email and things like that, the temptation is to just let it go. 42:47 It's to hear that weird sound on the phone of the voice and you're like, 42:55 "I know they're bent out of shape about something, but maybe we'll get to it in round 2 or 3." 42:59 You probably won't. It's probably just going to build. 43:05 I've had some really awkward, relationship-y conversation with clients where I feel like, 43:08 "Geez, I feel like I just talked to my boyfriend about my middle-school breakup." 43:14 But having those conversations usually really, really helps to move to the next level without that awkward tension, 43:18 so hug it out, move on, don't ignore that tension. 43:27 In summary, if you can communicate design and understand human psychology and the irrationality that comes with it, 43:33 you don't need as much bravado—not much. 43:43 So if you are not this person, that's okay. 43:48 Don't worry about being this person; just worry about being a great designer who can communicate design really well. 43:52