Sometimes I see how a client tells the professional they hired how to do certain things. You know — play with the colors, change the font, move a button, and all of these small things. I’m not a UX expert, but I guess it’s pretty annoying to handle.
Unfortunately, I see the same approach to more important things — more often than I would like to. You recommend a specific approach to your client — yet they refuse, ask for different options, and then select the most idiotic one. Even though you clearly specify that this option is idiotic.
What happens next? Obviously, he’s fucked. And no matter how often you repeat the «I told you» mantra — it’s obviously your fault. As a professional, you should have refused to go along the path that would doom your client. Yet sometimes you do play along. And regret it big time.
I’m Nikolay the Russian Guy, and today i will tell you a sad, but brutally honest, story of such a failure.
So, a German client came to us, asking for a mobile app for physiotherapists and their patients. 25 years of in-the-field experience resulted in quite an interesting hands-on approach which they would like to digitize. That sounded quite interesting, really.
Well, first things first — we went through our usual process, asking all kinds of business-related questions and systematizing the results, so in the end it appeared that they would actually like to build a much more broad ecosystem. Not only with physiotherapists and their patients — there also would be corporate clients, their employees, insurance companies and eventually even the government. Guys really would like to present a game-changing approach to personal health management, global scale.
At the same time, their immediate plans were completely off-track. Just implementing an app, which would then not showcase the big picture. ‘Cause they didn’t have the budget to implement the global thing, right? I mean — it certainly would cost hell of a lot of money. Just before that time that we did implement something similar in sheer volume of work, so we could tell them a relatively accurate cost. At least a year of a full-fledged team’s worth of work. You do the math.
Obviously, we offered them an alternative. Just go and implement a clickable low-fidelity prototype that demonstrate the functionality of an actual product — for all the roles that would be there, with core functionality for every role, that could be checked out, felt and understood. It could fit their budget perfectly well, and could secure them an investment needed to code the whole system.
No, they said, we would like to create the app. About 15% of the whole system’s functionality, mind you. For about 25% more cost than the lo-fi prototype.
Okay, then we told them that another option would be to create a hi-fi prototype of the app, along with a lo-fi prototype of the whole system, for roughly the same cost as an app development would cost. They could then show everyone a very detailed, actual-app-feeling clickable prototype of the app, and at the same time demonstrate the whole ecosystem as well.
No, they said, we would like to create the app.
Here I made my first mistake. I did not insist on the right approach, I let them fall into their own trap and make a bad business decision. Okay, I said, let’s then at least create an app prototype. You can show it to everyone, gather feedback, show a presentation of the whole ecosystem, and in the end understand where to put your money. Don’t waste all your budget on app implementation, create the prototype first. Make sure you know what you’re doing. Then you can always get back to this moment and decide whether to implement the app or prototype the ecosystem.
No, they said. We. Would like. To create. The app.
For fuck’s sake, sometimes clients are so stubborn.
And that was when I made my second mistake — and the worst one. I said «okay, we will implement your god damn app if you want it so much». What an idiotic thing it was for me to do. We went on with it, created UI mockups, signed them with the client, and proceeded with development.
So there were we — designing, coding and talking with the client about some details. Small details, big details, huge details — all over the place, as they didn’t really know how the app should function. There was no prototype to try it out, there was no customer feedback, there was no real understanding of how certain features should be implemented, from user’s perspective. An awful mess it was. Behind schedule by 30%, with the team making fun of «never-ending stream of new ideas».
Also, in about two months, after some additional research, talks and discussions, they came back to us with some fresh ideas of their own, how to make the product better. Huge ideas, like how to add B2B services to the app. You know — corporate clients with employees. Right. Fresh ideas indeed. Yet we didn’t have any budget for that anymore. It was already fucked up.
To summarize it, my inability to persuade the client to do the right thing resulted in:
- Loss of money on development — decision to to create the app looked like a way to save money, yet resulted in more money spent.
- Loss of opportunity to market the end-product, the ecosystem. Instead, client could only market the by-product, the physiotherapists app. And brag about huge ideas of the ecosystem, with nothing at all to back it up.
Well, one could argue that with such a stubborn client there was nothing I could do to prevent them from making these mistakes. And that would be wrong. Comforting — but wrong.
I could always tell them: «You are going to be doomed. And I want you to succeed, not to fail. So I refuse to do what you want me to do. If you want to fuck it up — do it with someone else. Sorry about that, and have a nice day.» Then I should walk out of the door. Sometimes words are not enough, and you have to back them up with actions.
But I wasn’t brutally honest with them to the end, so I failed them. What an asshole.