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Q. How much does the client really know about what they want?
A. Sometimes quite a bit, sometimes nothing at all but beware the ones that think they are the former when they are really the latter.
In a lot of cases, the client is going to defer to you when it comes to design issues. After all, they are calling you in because of the specialised knowledge you have and they don’t. Almost invariably, things that they think are simple, turn out not to be and things that they think are difficult or impossible, turn out to be easy. A few clients will be knowledgeable. Some may even have executed projects of their own and may be calling you in because they already know most of these ways in which a project can go wrong, and they’d rather it was you with your head on the spike instead of them. Most likely, you are going to get a client at some time or another who is going to ‘stick it to you’ like this.
Firstly, they’ll start in on the project themselves. Maybe they’ll think ahead and book the CD-ROM presses, the advertising space and also set up the distribution deal. All of this without really thinking through the development process. Maybe you think no one would be that stupid. Well think again. Because when one of my clients did this. They got to within 4 weeks of pressing the disks and came to the conclusion that not only could they not get the best out of the tools they had, but they didn’t really understand the implications of having 300 pictures to run through Photoshop and 250 pages of typescript to turn into hypertext. In 6 weeks they had managed to assemble 10 pages of text and five pictures into a prototype. That’s when they called me in. Its never easy getting a job done in an emergency like that but when the presses rolled, out popped a CD with all the pictures and text integrated into a run-time system. It came in on time, it was somewhat cheap because there wasn’t a great deal of time available for it to get any more expensive, and the quality was barely adequate. Because of the time scales, the client didn’t test the disks on a wide variety of machines so we had to ship an update afterwards so that the CD could be used for the asset data and the program could then run from a hard disk.
Check out the whole list of Cliff's pithy tips for Web developers.
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