Edit: Woah, this post broke containment! If you’re new here, hi! You can find some settings to customize your reading experience in the bottom right. This post contains swear words. I’ve censored the first one, but read on at your peril!
Many years ago, I had a client that sold a service. They weren’t a design agency, but for the sake of anonymity, we’ll just call them a design agency. Let us say that their core offering was a full-service design package, but they also made a substantial part of their income from doing smaller tasks related to their primary offering. These kind of services included smaller tasks like one-off campaigns or newsletter designs; tasks that their customers may very well be able to do on their own, but the prospect of freeing up some time by by offloading it to an expert was a tempting offer for many of their customers, and made up a significant chunk of their revenue.
We were hired to do a complete redesign of their site from the ground up. The process went smoothly at first, all the wireframes were approved without issue, but when it came to the design phase, we began to hit walls. For example, they would stumble across sites that they liked and wanted to depart from the agreed-upon wireframes in order to implement a similar design.
The problem was, they were thinking about their inspiration sites from an aesthetic point of view, not from a user experience perspective. Their decisions were coming from a place of ‘we like the balance of imagery and text in this page’ and not ‘we think this design will achieve the intended goal of the page.’ Now, you know me, I love a good singular gilded lily, but the client had unwittingly stumbled across a trap, they had fallen in love with what I call a “Fuck off contact page.”
A “fuck off contact page” is what a company throws together when they actually don’t want anyone to contact them at all. They are usually found on the websites of million or billion dollar companies, likely Software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies that are trying to reduce the amount of money they spend on support by carefully hiding the real support channels behind login walls. These companies tend to offer multiple tiers of support, with enterprise customers having a customer success manager who they can call on this ancient device we call phones, whereas the lower-paying customers may have to wrangle various in-app ticket mechanisms. If you solve your own problem by reading the knowledge base, then this is a win for the company. They don’t want to hear from you, they want you to fuck off. These are recreated versions of the wireframes that we did for the site, the original contact form version of the page is on the left, and the ‘fuck off contact page’ is on the right. In actuality, the ‘fuck off contact page’ was even more ‘fuck off’ due to the whitespace and a large hero image. This meant the only option that ‘talk to the sales team’, the only option that would put you in touch with a human anytime soon, was at the very bottom of the page, long after some people would stop scrolling. In other words, this is entirely inappropriate for the kind of service-based agency that our client was. The billion dollar SaaS company wants to reduce the number of incoming inquiries, and is hoping to weed out anyone who is not determined to contact them by giving them unsatisfying options. The service company wants to show how helpful they are and cultivate leads. These are fundamentally opposing goals. Let me explain further. I’m not sure about you, but as a user, when I see a button that says ‘talk to our sales team’, I treat the entire region of the page with the same trepidation as nuclear waste. The page is now a no-go zone, and I try to exit as quickly as possible, knowing that whatever my original query was, I’m going to have to solve it unassisted. Seeing as this is a company who makes money off of convincing people to let them handle the easy stuff, adding friction to this key part of their sales funnel just doesn’t feel like a winning strategy.
How the fuck did you convince them to change their minds? Try as we might, we couldn’t. In all honesty, we probably could have done more in order to talk them out of it, but the project had gone in such a way where we were focused on trying to talk the client out of changing other things that would drastically increase design or development time beyond the initial scope. In other words, we were too busy putting out other fires. This re-designed contact page, as certain as we were of how bad of an idea it was, wasn’t a fire, so we let it through. The project finished on time, everyone got paid, and the client was happy with the end result, but I still felt very disappointed in the whole thing. While I personally believe in the value of good design, I also believe there are a lot of smoke-and-mirrors in the industry, and I hated the thought that I might have inadvertently contributed to it. Even if the client is happy, it didn’t meet my internal bar for a quality product worth sticking my name on, and I feel like I’ve let down both the client and the end-users.
I think our problems started from before we even began to touch a single design tool. As a favor to one of the folks involved, we had discounted our rates for this client, and I think that set us off on the wrong foot. Instead of seeing us as people who brought valuable knowledge and expertise to the project, they saw us as the hands that would execute their vision. Especially for those not familiar with the process of design, it can be tempting to see things like discovery and wireframing as obstacles to be cleared before you get to the fun part, designing the visual identity. Unfortunately, many designers are also guilty of this! As service providers, I believe we need to do a better job on educating clients on the design process and why each step is so important. This is radical idea in some circles, but knowing why you’re building something is a necessary part of doing a good job at it! That’s why we do things like determining the architecture before we start thinking about the brand. Flow charts and diagrams are not as fun as interactive prototypes, but they’re much more important to get right. Also, the discounted pricing probably didn’t help — instead of signaling that we were doing a favor out of respect for them, it just signaled that we were easily exploitable. There was a lack of trust throughout the process, on both sides. While I really want to believe that I can have the kind of relationships with clients where constructive disagreement is welcomed and valued, how I get there is still something I’m figuring out, even many years later. I think that’s part of the reason why I blog. By blogging, I’m putting a body of work out there that communicates my values and ethos. While much of the details of my client work has to remain private, these posts can be public, and hopefully they can help me find people who resonate with what I have to offer. Or you know, just be bold enough to communicate ‘Fuck off’ to those who don’t! (Feel free to reach out if you’re interested in working with folks who care, maybe a little too much, about doing right by your users.)