It’s a bit of a confrontational title, but this is a bit of a confrontational post.

This is an all too common situation

The disparity between what a client should get from their web agency and what they do get is all too often down to the established process of client brief / agency proposal. Paul Boag spoofed this situation with his tongue-in-cheek blog post: 10 things a web designer would never tell you. The fact that many people took the list seriously before seeing the joke is not so surprising considering that many people accept this way of working and allow it to continue.

Clients! Listen up!

In order for a web project to be as good as it can be, everybody should be playing to their strengths. An insurance company employing a web agency to build a site to their own spec is going to end up with a site that is only as good as one built by an insurance company. They might as well ask a web designer to write insurance policies for them.

Why buy a dog and bark yourself?

A digital agency doesn’t need to see a detailed, page-by-page breakdown of how you think a social network should work. It’s their job to understand the ins-and-outs of these things and at the end of the day, there’s a good chance that the world at large isn’t interested in your car insurance based social network – they’re all having too much fun poking each other on Facebook and filling out questionaires to find out which Family Guy character they are.

Here’s an Analogy

Let’s take the same situation into a different industry; imagine that you want a bespoke suit tailored for you. Here are two possible options:

1. You send the tailor a set of estimated measurements along with instruction on what type of fabric to use and how to sew the suit together, then ask him to make you six different variations of the suit on the understanding that you would pay him for the one that you liked best.
2. You could meet with the tailor, let him take your measurements, explain what you wanted the suit for and then allow him to guide your decisions based on his experience.

Unless you are a very strange individual, you will most probably have, quite rightly, dismissed option 1 as stupid and ridiculous.

Now in your head, replace that suit with your company website and the tailor with a web agency … done that? OK – hopefully option 1 still seems like a silly way to achieve the best results and yet:

PEOPLE CONTINUE TO DO THIS – EACH. AND. EVERY. DAY.

As the inimitable Jeffrey Zelman stated:

Agencies, you are just as bad

This isn’t just the client’s fault, in the analogy all but the worst possible tailor would have refused the work given option 1 and yet thousands of web agencies perpetuate this way of working. There seems to be an attitude that the client’s requests must be followed to the letter, no matter how time-consuming, expensive and ultimately, pointless they may be. Would it really be too risky to contact the potential client and explain that pitching ideas and designs on spec is, in the long run, going to be costly both in the quality of the work and more importantly that magic word money. 

For example, if an agency spends £2000 on a pitch to client A, £2000 pounds on a pitch to client B and £2000 on a pitch to client C and then only wins the contract from client C. The budget for the project not only has to have the cost of the pitch deducted but in order for the agency to recoup sales costs, they must deduct the cost of all three pitches. For the client, by choosing to work with an agency who are willing to do the speculative design work, they are getting £6000 less work done than if they had chosen an agency who refused to provide design work as part of their pitch. For the agency, these additional cost constraints result in perhaps not being able to do the work to as high a standard as they would like, potentially leaving their client dissatisfied and unwilling to continue working with them.

As Paul Boag points out, speculative design work is a really bad idea, not only is it bad for the agency, it’s just as bad for the client.

Swimming upstream

We are working in an industry which is still comparatively youthful, one which is still evolving, an industry with constantly moving goalposts. Despite these changing conditions we continue to use the same business processes for no better reason than “it’s the way these things have always been done”. It’s so sad when web professionals see somebody become successful by “breaking the rules” and doing things differently, then after admiring those peoples’ efforts, go back to doing the same things that they’ve been doing for years. 

It’s like swimming upstream, the moment you stop swimming, you start moving backwards.

How much time are we wasting?

Amazingly, all of this time and effort was spent before the client and the agency sat down together to discuss the project. An investment of 2-3 weeks worth of work just to secure a meeting in which the real project could start to be discussed. Unfortunately, it’s hard for both the client and the agency to let go of this investment, even if the emerging project criteria prove the proposal to be unsuitable.

I know it’s not the best solution but we have to do it this way because we spent a fortune on the pitch

The key to reducing the amount of wasted time is to try and get to the talking face-to-face stage as quickly as possible, how that occurs is down to individual clients and agencies to figure out. Some possible suggestions are:

• Client spec/brief should be written in terms of what you want to achieve, rather than how you want to achieve it.
• Agencies should explain clearly, the reasoning behind not producing speculative work.
• Arrange a meeting in which the  client’s key stakeholders can talk with experienced agency production staff – no sales people, there will be time to barter over prices once there is a clear idea of what the best solutions are.

To paraphrase Paul Boag once more:

To request speculative [work] is to deny your own importance in the process.

The same sentiment could be applied to the agencies who’s proposals consist of how they would implement the client’s specifications.

By giving the client only what they’ve asked for, is to deny your own experience in the industry.