Making clear goals for a project

Dealing with new projects and clients that set unclear goals are a bad combination. If you have had a longer collaboration with a certain client, you are familiar with their way of working, but if it is the first time you ever work with this client, settings clear goals are essential.

An example would be, if a client asks for a new website in blue that is mobile friendly. It may seem like nit-picking, but as an experienced web designer, you would have to ask some pretty basic questions to make sure the client understands what it is paying for.

• Do you need access to change data yourself?
• What demographic is the majority of your audience? Blue as a design requirement is not enough to build UI/UX from.
• What kind of blue? Be god damn sure you know which nuance they want

Continue with questions like this and clarify exactly what the client needs and how you can solve it. I see too many designers simply accepting the order, give a quote, making the product, and at the end go through countless iterations, cause the blue colour is not right, the banner is too tall, the font size needs to be bigger cause all the people using it are primarily 70+, and the wordpress backend is too complicated and heavy for a CMS – I just needed to be able to change the phone number.

Avoid making these mistakes, and be clear and transparent with the client – it will make for a lot more fluent experience and later on a much stronger business relationship.