Your client's dream is your nightmare

Published By zooboole

As a developer or designer, your job is to put yourself in your client's shoes. You need to comprehend their feeling and come up with what they dream of as a final product. That should be a concrete form which would match exactly what you think/understood they thought or dreamed of.

This process is part of our creative job. That's how we work. That's how we send knowledge from one person to another.

While the procedure might seem normal to the ordinary man, it's a very tedious situation for us. Because the process of reading the other mind is one of the most complicated things to do. Should we thank God for not connecting human souls? Anyway, it's late now to complain. The process remains synchronous. We need to understand the client's need before we can proceed to any work.

Unfortunately, clients only have dreams. And, their dreams become our nightmares at the moment they finish dreaming and wake up. That's the moment you receive a call:

Huh, this is what I have. I need a simple website which will allow us to have some global presence. We would like at the same time to include some features like facebook, and video streaming like youtube. By the way, can you also give them the option to search through the site like Google? Please, look at how you can help us do it oh. We are just starting and we don't have the money yet, so,... I hope you understand?.

If you like we can even go into partnership. You bring your skills and build it and then we take care of the rest. Note, there is no other rest. You are going to do the whole job.

Every single time I hear such things I get lost and I lose my words. What can I say to have an agreement with them?

Some people think coding flows like in dreams. The developer is the wizard. He will hit a few keys here and there and boom the job is done.

A developer/designer to understand your dream very well. How you want it to look like or how it should work. With that, he could execute the project. This stage can take a lot of time and effort which an ordinary person would find boring or as a waste of time. At this point, many clients/bosses could think their guy is not willing to work.

At the same time, you need to develop the skills of listening and interpreting people's ideas. Not being able to do that will always put you in unnecessary discussions with your clients. And, you might find yourself forcing the client to adopt your idea of the situation.

The second side of the mind game that you need to understand is how to be able to re-explain the client's idea to him/her in return.

Someone once said that anything that's well understood can be explained. And, the words to do so come easily. Many of us have that challenge and it even affects how we behave during job interviews.

Cover image credit to pixabay.com