What Clients Actually Care About

It’s not what Designers think it is

Most designers — especially early in their career — have a very clear, and very wrong, idea of what to present to their clients. Designers often want to talk about process and iteration, while clients want to hear about one simple item — solutions.

The underlying problem is one of perspective. When you’re doing design work, you see every part of the process that got you to the solution you’re presenting: the iterations, the set-up, the background information that informed your decisions. These decisions are critical to successful outcomes, and in design school we’re taught to defend them before reaching a solution. In consulting and business roles, this approach is exactly backwards.

As you present to higher levels in an organisation, especially to executives, you always start with the ending. In practical terms, this means a presentation with:

• One slide on the business problem you’re solving
• One slide on the solution
• One slide on how you plan to deliver that solution successfully

Everything else can be placed into an appendix, ready to share. But it’s not important unless a client asks, and for the most part, it doesn’t need to be made important. The more you show, the more you invite questions and derailment. As a consultant, you have one mission — Get in, solve the problem, get out. In the process of successfully starting, running, and growing four different design studios in the last 10 years, this is an issue I’ve had to address with hundreds of designers who desperately want to show the process, planning, and iteration.

I’ve been challenged on this by numerous designers, who stomp their feet and insist that the process is critical. But it’s not — not to the client, anyway. It’s just what we think is important. If the client wants to know, they’ll ask. Most executives are exhausted, busy, and interested in how you are going to solve their problems. That’s all. If you can save executives time in meetings, you’ll be their favourite person.

To reinforce this point, at Modernist we use DocSend to share proposals and decks with clients. One of the handy features of DocSend is that it actually logs the amount of time a recipient spends reviewing different parts of a document, and this provides invaluable insights on what people truly care about.

Below is a recent example, where a client spent 22 seconds reviewing the part of a proposal where we described what we would deliver, and seven minutes on the pricing page. This lets us know not only what’s important for our next discussion, but why it might be important (e.g. because it’s a competitive bid and the client is comparing decks).

If you’re on a design team, I can save you thousands of dollars/euros/yuan in executive coaching. These simple broad rules for presenting to clients that will help you focus on what they really want to see and how to deliver it.

1. Find out what the client actually values and needs to see. As seen above, it’s often not what we think.
2. Be clear on what business problem you are solving. If it’s a design problem, be clear on why it’s important to the business.
3. Make everything actionable. Don’t deliver “10 concepts,” deliver “10 concepts prioritised against your business goals, estimated for development, and planned into a roadmap.”
4. Use clear crisp language. Stop saying “try / help / assist with / perhaps” so much — writers and journalists call these weasel words. Get in the habit of saying “We will deliver X” or “This will do X” more often. The client knows you’re not omnipotent, so no need to hedge every statement.
5. Don’t use condescending language when presenting. Phrases like “let me explain this to you”, “what I think you need to understand is…”, or “this is a very complex topic, we don’t have time for everything here” suggest that you value your own perspective above the client’s. Your job isn’t to educate them in design processes or their problem, it’s to clearly present a solution.

To be fair, a lot of seasoned designers have figured these principles out on their own, either through trial and error or by putting real effort into developing empathy for their clients. Many others still resist, though, despite an abundance of evidence that clients prefer it when you get to the point. My strongest theory here is that it’s incredibly hard to not tell someone about 95% of something you’ve put weeks or months of effort into, and limit yourself to the 5% that’s relevant to them. That’s human nature — we want recognition for our labour and expertise — and it’s also easy to forget that what’s interesting to everyone in the studio might not be interesting to anyone else.

But like it or not, that’s the job. A mechanic who explains every bolt and gasket that went into a repair before handing your car keys back wouldn’t last long as a mechanic. The same goes for designers, perhaps even more so. We are, after all, supposed to be exceptional at spotting user needs and solving for them. In this case, the user needs us to stop talking and get to the point.

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