As creative and talented people, web designers and developers sometimes get into a funk – usually called “burn out”. I believe much of that funk can be attributed to their ever-dwindling patience with the very people they are there to serve – the customers.
It doesn’t matter if that customer is internal or external to your organization. Your job as a creative is to articulate the value of what you are proposing. And not only that, you also have to describe the process you’re going to follow in order for both you and your customer to achieve success. Finally, you have to make the sale and convince them to pay your price. That could be the internal time frame you need or real greenbacks. Sounds straightforward right? Well, it’s not.
I believe much of our frustration comes from customers who think they already know how it should be done, what’s involved, and ultimately devalue our contribution to the project. How many times have you had a customer deliver a document describing what they want on the home page of their site only to then have them turn around and say designing that home page should only take a few days because they’ve “practically done all the work already”.
What about when you build a new feature that does X but then the customer decides they want it to do Y. It’s all fun and games until the customer then asks you to revert back to X. Furthermore they think because X was already built, it’s basically like simply changing lanes on a highway or making a U-turn. “You should be able to have X back in place this afternoon right”? Slow down sparky.
Now it’s your job to explain how that code was branched a long, long time ago and you’ll have to merge it back into the product months later when 9,000 other things have been added since then. Then you’re going to have to run your testing routines and possibly do manual regression tests on the entire system to ensure you haven’t borked everything. Then THEY are going to need to test it and approve it for production launch because their idea of X 3 months ago is probably not going to be what they think X should be today. As you know, the list of details goes on and ultimately you spend 8 hours putting something in place that the customer thinks should have taken 15 minutes.
Circling to my original point, if you can’t properly and effectively communicate what you are doing, why you have to do it, the processes involved, and WHY YOU KNOW BEST AS THE EXPERT ON THE PROJECT then you’re setting yourself up for some major frustration. In my experience, customers just don’t know what they don’t know. If you take the time to explain it to them and justify what you already know is the correct approach, you’ll find your working relationship with them will improve and they will start to question less and move forward more.
. Go into it with an open mind and some patience, and I think you’ll find it’s a lot of fun.
I wanted to implement a simple captcha for for article comments on a site. And by simple, I mean both in aesthetics and in functionality. After looking around, I found 
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