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Hav­ing taught, as well as being friends with many other teachers,I have very good con­tacts with the up and com­ing grad­u­ates in my industry.

Many times, while on place­ment (unpaid work expe­ri­ence for stu­dents) the stu­dents would come visit me seek­ing advice.

I remem­ber one young lady who came by my office in tears once. She was tasked with redesign­ing her company’s busi­ness card, but the owner kept ask­ing for things, and chang­ing the req­ui­sites, until the card became a night­mare from a design perspective.

I asked her why she allowed her client to do this, and she said “well, the cus­tomer is always right…so I kept try­ing to do what they asked.”

In my opin­ion, this is the wrong atti­tude to take. As an expert in the field, you have been trained to know what is right and what isn’t. The rea­son peo­ple hire experts is to bring in knowl­edge that they don’t have them­selves. You’re job is not to aide the client in mak­ing mis­takes, rather, it’s your respon­si­bil­ity to pre­vent the client from mak­ing mistakes.

I have a client from Florida who one time called and asked, “For the amount of money you’re charg­ing me, am I get­ting light­ning bolts on my web­site?”. I answered, “No, for the amount of money I’m charg­ing you, you are not get­ting light­ning bolts on your web­site”. It’s my job to make the site effec­tive. I don’t design “CEO Web­sites” (a site the CEO, who never uses the site, can brag to his bud­dies about because it does cool, and use­less, things). My job is to under­stand how the project meets a need, and ful­fils it. Some­times that may be some­thing the com­pany never thought of, or wanted.

In the design indus­try, peo­ple may not always like a design due to per­sonal taste. It’s my job to explain why we did what we did, and why what they want won’t work. There are rea­sons why good design­ers do what they do (not to be con­fused with bad design­ers who do things because “they liked it”). I’ve rarely found a client who, once you explain the rea­sons why your design is done and why their ideas won’t work, will still insist on going ahead with their ideas.

Get­ting back to the student’s prob­lem, by allow­ing the cus­tomer to pro­vide bad input, she under­mined her own exper­tise. The cus­tomer lost respect for her knowl­edge, and inflated the opin­ion of his own. I later had a con­ver­sa­tion with the owner, who couldn’t under­stand why he couldn’t land contracts…his pro­pos­als looked very bush-league, and he com­peted against com­pa­nies like IBM. He never under­stood the poor impres­sion he was mak­ing by not even hav­ing a nice cover to his proposals…

Your job as an expert is to be an expert. If you’re not an expert, your cus­tomers shouldn’t hire you. Your cus­tomer isn’t an expert, and their wants are often clouded by the blind­ers of being immersed in their com­pany (they can’t see what they look like to their cus­tomers), or the solu­tions that they need. If you don’t tell them they are wrong, then you are not doing your job.

Even though this arti­cle is about design, the same rules should apply in most com­pa­nies, and even if you’re an employee. Your job should be to pre­vent prob­lems, not con­tribute to them. Remem­ber though, you have to be able to explain WHY you are right and WHY they are wrong (and if you answer “because I like/don’t like it”, then you don’t really know why).

Les­son: If you can’t  answer WHY then look for an expert.

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