“How hard would it be to make a button…”

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard sentences start with those exact works from clients. Early in my career, usually after the initial delivery of a beta, I’d get that question. I’d listen to the whole thing, put my head down, maybe ask a couple of questions about the details, think for a moment, and then come up with an estimate. Since I’m a pessimist, unlike most programmers, that number would often dissuade the client from proceeding.

After a few rounds of this, they’d complain that we weren’t as responsive as we were in the initial engagement. At first, that puzzled me. Our response time was usually just as fast, and in fact sometimes I was giving the estimate live in the meeting. They’d respond we weren’t as “flexible,” which I took to mean they were getting sticker shock and wanted the rate of feature delivery they got in the main site development even though they didn’t have a fraction of the budget.

Listening past the question

Over time I realized that’s not really what they meant. What they really meant is that we weren’t engaging with the same level of problem-solving we were in the initial engagement. In some ways, that wasn’t fair: in the initial site build, we often had strategic goals, long discussions about what they wanted, what their workflow was like, and how we could adapt the technology to meet their needs and stay within the budget. We were in contact several times a week and got updates on changes at their organization quickly.

Once the main site was done, that level of awareness was gone, so when they’d come out of the blue with a request, my automatic customer-service response was simply to answer the question as asked. Once I figured out they were frustrated with several rounds of that, I learned to listen past the question and instead of asking details, follow up with, “What’s the problem you’re having now that this would solve?”

Overcoming literalism

Unfortunately that’s not an insight that comes easily. Not only does it take experience, it takes a certain mindset. Junior people haven’t learned it yet, people from a sales background want to get an answer back quickly above all, and programmers are notoriously literal-minded and don’t often think about the meaning behind what is being said.

On the organization’s side, it’s also easy to get caught up in “feature fever,” especially as you start to understand the possibilities of web applications and how they can make your life easier. It’s incredibly tempting to envision a magic easy button that solves your problem. The only hangup is that while it looks like the flying magic unicorn pony simply drops elements on a page and they are easy to use and work perfectly, it actually takes a great deal of user experience and engineering skill to make a site function naturally and intuitively.

So the best defense against a good relationship going sour is a good offense: ask your web developer or agency to propose solutions to your problems. Explain to them the way you are doing things now, whether online or offline, let them know where the pain comes in, and ask them if there are any ways they can think of to simplify that. Often even the most inexperienced, literal developer will brighten up and say, “Oh! Yeah, we could just…” and suggest not only something that solves the problem, but solves with the least cost to implement, because good programmers are lazy.