Original Source: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/09/job-interview-questions-designer/

Tough Interview(er) Questions For The Job-Seeking Designer

Tough Interview(er) Questions For The Job-Seeking Designer

Joshua Bullock

2018-09-26T13:30:31+02:00
2018-09-26T11:46:24+00:00

Whether you’re a multi-year veteran to the UX industry or fresh out of a higher education or boot camp style program, setting out into the job market can be a daunting task for any designer. From freelancing or working for a more boutique studio, doing agency work, or joining the enterprise, a myriad of positions, requirements, and organizations are available for a design practitioner who is looking to take the next steps in their career.

In this article, I’ll present a list of questions from my personal experience to consider leading up to and even during the interview process. I’ll also include the goal when asking the questions, basically what you’re trying to learn, along with responses I’ve received when asking them of prospective employers.

As with anything, your mileage might vary, but considering these topics before an interview may help you better solidify the perspective on what you are looking for from your next position. It is written primarily from the position of an interviewee, however hiring managers may also find them valuable by looking at their company through that lens and considering them for prospective designers.

Recommended reading: The Missing Advice I Needed When Starting My Career

Understanding Design Maturity

Jared Spool and other UX leaders have written a few things about the design maturity of organizations and the ideal distribution of design resources. When considering taking a design position within an organization, how might we look at the company through this lens and better understand where they are on their experience journey? With numerous titles being thrown around (Experience Designer, Product Designer, UI Designer, Interaction Designer, UX Designer, and so on), what might provide additional clarity for the working relationship you’re about to enter into and the role you are about to assume?

Having a few years in various design roles, I’ve spent time on both sides of the interview table — both as a hiring manager and as a prospective employee. In every interview I’ve been a part of, be it part of the hiring team or as an interviewee, an opportunity was presented to inquire about the team or organization. “Do you have any questions for us?” is the most common phrase I’ve heard and this presents a golden opportunity to dig deep and gain valuable insights into the dynamics of the team and organization you’re speaking with.

Meet SmashingConf New York 2018 (Oct 23–24), focused on real challenges and real front-end solutions in the real world. From progressive web apps, Webpack and HTTP/2 to serverless, Vue.js and Nuxt — all the way to inclusive design, branding and machine learning. With Sarah Drasner, Sara Soueidan and many other speakers.

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When I am applying, I’m on the verge of entering into a new relationship, and to the best of ability, I want to understand where we are both headed. Just as the organization is investing in me as an individual, I am being asked for a commitment of time, energy, passion, creativity, and least of all artifacts. I would like to understand as much about my partners as possible. Given that no prenuptials exist in the working world, we may eventually part ways, and our engagement should be as profitable as possible for both sides.

I’ve asked the aforementioned question many times of prospective candidates, and in some cases, the response has regrettably been completely passed over. The seemingly benign, “Do you have any questions for us?” opening affords any designer a wealth of opportunity to learn more about the company and design engagement. If design solves problems by gathering information, I propose we attend the hiring process as we would any other research effort.

Interviewing is a great opportunity to get to know the company, take notes! (Large preview)

Interviewing Like A Researcher

The following is a list of questions that can assist in your evaluation of a prospective employer and provide invaluable insight into their organizational maturity in the digital product space. All of these questions can help to paint a more holistic and honest picture of the design process as well as the value that a talented designer might bring to an organization. Below I’ll share questions I’ve asked, as well as their intent, along with some responses I’ve received from prospective employers. Let’s dive in.

Question #1

“What are the three biggest challenges facing your business over the next six months? What about the six months after that?”

Why ask this?

This is on the ground information for any designer. Upcoming challenges should be readily apparent for anyone on the existing team, and they’re already considering how the person being interviewed might help solve them. Framing the question in this way can provide valuable insight into how far ahead the team is thinking and how proficient they are at planning. It also can help a designer quickly bring value and insights to the organization.

What follow-ups might provide more insight?

Does work exist in the pipeline that a designer can help immediately bring to the product through evaluative research?
Is there a product that has been delayed based on initial feedback?
What insights were learned and how can that be used to tighten cycles and quickly iterate to production?
Is a project hemorrhaging funds from a past launch that didn’t grow as quickly as anticipated?
Are there ideas of how to save this investment and help it become successful?

How is this question received?

This is honestly the easiest of any question on this list. It’s a bit of a softball as I would expect any executive, manager, or team member to have this information top-of-mind. That said, when I’ve asked the question it shows that I’m already considering the above and how I might be a positive influence quickly. I’ve consistently gotten great answers to this question, and it also allows for an open conversation on how a candidates’ particular skill set could be leveraged immediately once hired.

Question #2

“Should you be moving fast and breaking things or moving slow and fixing things?”

Why ask this?

Facebook popularized the mantra of “Move fast and break things,” in an effort to fail quickly while continuing to grow from what was learned. While fostering a culture of continual learning is enormously valuable, not all problems can be solved by creating completely new products.

Continuing to cover up technical debt through a constant barrage of new features can be catastrophic. That said, many organizations are held hostage by successful products that continuously add features so much that innovation is completely stifled. It’s very helpful to understand both sides of this question and the value they can bring to a product’s design.

What follow-ups might provide more insight?

How comfortable is the team with the idea of shipping a rough Minimum Viable Product (MVP), to gain insights quickly?
How risk-averse is the company or group or even the design team?
Is the business dealing with a very fragile codebase?
How frequently is tech debt refactored?
How is UX debt identified and managed?

How is this question received?

This is a very thought-provoking question for lean/agile organizations and the most common response I’ve received has been, “That’s a really great question,” and the ever-popular “It depends.” I’ve gotten fantastic responses by asking this as it affords an honest reflection on the current state of the business. The design team likely has an opinion on whether they are moving too fast or too slow and if they should behave a bit differently.

The answer doesn’t need to be a scary thing, but it should be honest and should afford some honest reflection. The best designers I’ve known appreciate hearty challenges they can dig into, and this question can provide additional clarity as to what you’re stepping into.

Question #3

“If you’re moving fast, why?

Why ask this?

Moving fast can be very exhilarating, but it may not result in productivity. To some stakeholders I’ve spoken with, the word “Agile” is synonymous with “I get my things faster.” In reality, being agile or ‘lean’ is about learning and delivering the right product or solution in the smallest way to customers. Moving fast can be very advantageous so long as it’s coupled with a willingness from design to show work that may not be perfect but is functional to the point of being usable. This is where moving fast is great; learning can be realized quickly and new product directions can be identified early. This can inform an interviewing designer on how data and research are being collected and distributed to other teams or the larger organization. Alternatively, if this isn’t happening, it could indicate a large opportunity for change or an unmitigated disaster so be on the lookout and follow-up accordingly.

What follow-ups might provide more insight?

Are you trying to break things and learn from failure, or just moving fast because of #things?
Are you looking to gain mindshare in a new market?
How is the growth being managed?
How is the doubling or tripling of staff affecting team dynamics, agile health, or even the company culture?
What plan is in place for documenting and disseminating learning that has been gathered?
How important is this task for the organization and the work I do as a designer?

How is this question received?

This question and the next tend to be contingent on individual teams or parts of the company. I’ve also had it backfire a bit as it’s easy for someone to become defensive of their organizational behavior. One exuberant response I’ve heard is “We’re failing fast and failing often on our teams!” but when pressed with, “What have you learned from those failures? How has that learning been incorporated into the project and received by leadership?” responses were a bit uncomfortable. This is a massive red flag for me — honesty is tremendously important to me. Just be aware this can start to get into uncomfortable territory, but it can also speak volumes about a team or leader in how they manage their response.

Question #4

“If you’re moving slow, why?”

Why ask this?

Sites and applications are like rose bushes: if they aren’t pruned periodically they can get unruly and — eventually — downright ugly. Likewise, the continuous addition of new features to any code base without sufficient refactoring and paying down tech debt can create a very fragile product. The company may have started moving quickly to capture market share or breaking things in order to build quickly and try out changes to the tech stack.

From a design perspective, the biggest experience gains aren’t necessarily from a design system or improved onboarding. The company may need to modernize the tech stack to focus on improved performance or application up-time. The team may need to make changes to their delivery mechanism providing some form of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CICD), a system where a designer can more easily implement A/B testing and better understand where the most impactful changes might be made.

Most designers would likely not give a second thought to the state of the tech stack because that’s an ‘engineering problem’, amirite? However, getting an up-front look at the state of the product from a technical perspective is immeasurably valuable, even to design.

Understanding where the company is in upgrading their systems, what frameworks are being used, and how willing they are to invest in the infrastructure of a legacy product provides a glimpse into the company or team priorities.

What follow-ups might provide more insight?

Which parts of the site/application/product are least-effective?
Should they be retired or reinvested in?
How might these upgrades impact day-to-day work?
Are new features being prioritized into the new product development so we can phase out aging systems?
How will these changes impact customers?
Can they still get their jobs done in the new system or are they going to be retired?
How is that being communicated to users?
Has there been any communication around sunsetting these retiring systems to lessen the burden?
Has any analysis been done to understand how much revenue is provided by those users whose features are about to come to an end?

How is this question received?

This line of questioning has typically been handled offline as managers I’ve spoken to didn’t have the answers handy. They were typically fielded by an IT or Dev manager, who was more than happy to see that level of interest from a designer. As a designer, I don’t need to understand the details of my team’s API end-points, but I should understand something about the health of my digital product.

The interview process is about mutual discovery—learn as much about your potential team and organization as they are learning about you. (Large preview)

Question #5

“What are the three pieces of your product that are most valuable but also in the most need of an update?”

Why ask this?

This question is all about priority and, similar to the prior question, this could be digging more into the tech stack of the product. My reason for asking actually has more to do with the “core loop” of the product. The core-loop is the dopamine hit that attracts a user and keeps them coming back to enjoy the product repeatedly.

It’s akin to the food pellet that makes a rat respond to stimuli. It can also be a prime pain-point that’s a massive trigger for catastrophic system failure, and thus ultimate fear within the team. “Don’t do anything to this or our entire system could shut down.” When considering some changes to that legacy system perhaps we simply leave it alone, but we might enhance it in another way leveraging something more modern as an overlay or in a new tab or window?

What follow-ups might provide more insight?

What is standing in the way of doing this work?
What team members could we talk to about these features?
Have they done any research to understand what’s causing the behavior to be erratic or difficult to maintain?
What users can we speak with about the features to understand how they’re using it?
Perhaps there’s a slight tweak that could be made enabling the same outcome, but putting less stress on the system?
Are there small tweaks that could be made to relieve pressure on the back-end and reduce strain on the database?

How is this question received?

Similar to the prior question, this can quickly get technical but it doesn’t have to. I’ve posted the question to a hiring manager who also forwarded it to a member of the product and dev teams who all gave slightly different answers. As suspected, they all provided some overlap which clearly showed what the most important problem was to work on from the business’ perspective. Don’t hesitate to ask they forward the inquiry on to someone who might be better suited or could provide a more nuanced response. Gathering broad viewpoints is a hallmark of what we designers do well.

Question #6

“Do you have a customer I might contact to get their thoughts about your product or service?”

Why ask this?

This may be the boldest question on this list, but it provides so much amazing value as an incoming designer. If we are operating as practitioners of a human-centered approach, we should be comfortable talking to users and our employer should be comfortable ensuring we have access to them. Granted, you may not yet be a member of the team, and they’re not yet your customer. But putting a willing foot forward in this area speaks confidently that you would love to get first-hand access to customer feedback.

What follow-ups might provide more insight?

How familiar is your team talking to their users?
How often does this activity take place?
Assuming this customer is a fan of the company, do we have access to users who aren’t so happy with the product?
Do we ever seek feedback from someone who has canceled the service?
How might the team use any insights you bring back to them?

How is this question received?

This question is bold and can be a bit tricky. Sometimes the team doesn’t have a good customer in mind, or even if they do, they don’t have ready access to them as customers are handled by a separate gatekeeper. At the same time, I would expect most companies to have a short-list of customers who think they’ve hung the moon. The marketing department tends to plaster their quotes all over the home page so feel free to look for that prior to the interview and ask for those contacts directly.

When asking this question, I’ve also provided the questions I was intending to ask as well as the answers I got back. With free user research on the table and an opportunity for the marketing team to gain additional positive feedback asking this worked out in my favor, but that won’t always be the case. Be gracious and understand if someone’s not comfortable providing this access, but it’s a strong play in expectation setting for a human-centered design practice.

Question #7

“What is your dedicated budget for UX and design?”

Why ask this?

If the value of user experience is wrapped up solely in market research, then the company doesn’t understand a human-centered approach through their users. Market research can certainly be valuable by informing the company if a business idea might be financially viable. However, user research can guide the organization in delivering something truly valuable. This question can help a prospective designer understand that the company sees design as an investment and competitive advantage.

What follow-ups might provide more insight?

What percentage of your overall expenditures does this represent and why?
What is the highest-titled member of the design team?
What is the education budget in a given year for training or events?
Has this grown, shrunk, or stayed flat compared to the prior year?
What are the growth areas for the design team overall, i.e. where is the design investment focused?

Research?
Visual design?
Copywriting?
Architecture?

How is this question received?

This is honestly more of a leadership question, but it can be tailored to even an entry-level position. Any organization without a clear operating budget for design isn’t taking the practice seriously nor its practitioners. Product, engineering, and design are the components of a balanced team. Funding one at the behest of another is a dumpster fire and clearly communicates that the balance is out of alignment.

The easiest answer I’ve been given is the salary and position I’m applying for, however, that shows a lack of foresight in terms of both growth for the team by way of headcount, as well as properly empowering designers to do their best work.

Discussions during an interview. You have the floor so use it to your advantage. (Large preview)

Just The Beginning

These are just a few of the types of things we could be talking about during experience or product design interviews. We certainly should care about excellent visual design and elegant UI. We should absolutely care about qualitative and quantitative analytic data and the insights they provide. We should definitely care about motion design, user flows, journey maps, design systems, microcopy, and culture fit. These are all part of the playbook of any strong, digital-design candidate. But the answers to the above topics can be incredibly impactful for the first 90 days and beyond when assuming a new design role.

You may not be able to ask these questions in a face-to-face discussion, but they make a great follow-up email after an interview. Or perhaps they’re questions you keep in the back of your mind as they’ll inevitably come up in your first few months on the job. They could prove very useful to guide a longer-term, strategic vision that empowers you to improve the business by crafting glorious engagement with both your teams and your customers.

Does Asking These Things Actually Help Get The Job?

I’ve been asked if these questions were helpful in landing a better job and truthfully, I don’t know. I did find a very rewarding new position as a Principal Product Designer, and I used these questions throughout the interview process. After I was hired, I spoke to a couple of folks who were part of that process, and they mentioned the questions, so they were at least memorable.

The entire line of questioning has also resulted in the opportunity to co-author a book around using design to address organizational change and reconsidering how the field of experience design is currently defined. I would posit both of these opportunities were impacted in some way by these thought-provoking questions, even if the projects have yet to be fully realized (we are just starting work on the book, but it’s a very exciting concept).

I also used the questions in interviews with several different companies and ultimately, I was able to entertain multiple offers. Through each interview using these questions allowed me deeper insights about the organization than I would have had otherwise. Did the questions directly help me get the position? Of that I’m unsure, but they were absolutely beneficial for both my own awareness and for the team I eventually joined.

Final Thoughts

Approaching the job interview process more like a researcher gave me a very different perspective on the process. Interviewing can be a stressful event, but it can also be a mutual glimpse into a shared future. Any prospective employer is inviting a designer to embark on a life journey with them — or at least a year or two — and the interview is where the two parties really start to get to know one another. The answers to these questions can help paint a more transparent picture of the shared road ahead for both the designer and the teams they might partner with.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments, and whether you have other tough questions you’ve asked during interviews. I would love to know how they’ve been received and continue adding to my own list!

Further Reading

“How You Can Find A Design Job You Will Truly Love,” Susie Pollasky
“Facebook Changes Its ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ Motto,” Samantha Murphy, Mashable
“Sprints & Milestones” podcast by Brett Harned and Greg Storey
“Playbook” offers career advice for designers via crowdsourced Q&A
“Dear Design Student” is a collab from some amazing industry veterans providing wisdom to up-and-coming design talent. #invaluable

(mb, ra, yk, il)

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/abduzeedo/~3/Gp2Wqaaupcg/window-past-amazing-art-deco-posters-mads-berg

A Window to the Past: Amazing Art Deco Posters by Mads Berg

GisMullr
Sep 25, 2018

Mads Berg is a Danish designer well known for his exquisite posters. His singular style is simply stunning. Check out the posters we have here and you will be hooked too. His incredible and bold art deco artworks will certainly take you back in time. Mads posters are elegant, colorful and stylish. The way he uses lines and curves delivers a modern take on the classic poster look. It is a beautiful combination of great illustration, type and shapes. In my opinion his images bring a certain glamour back to advertisement. It is a simple and elegant way of delivering a very clear message. I can see Don Draper – from Mad Men – showing these to his clients. So take your Old Fashioned cocktail, seat back and enjoy.

Mads work was already showcased here twice: back in 2014 and 2013. Since it has been a while and because he has a ton of new and inspiring pieces, we are showcasing his work again. And remember to check his website for more info and artworks.

Based in Copenhagen, Mads Berg is widely known for his modern art deco style and vintage graphics. His main fields of illustration are posters, brand illustrations, key visuals, editorial illustrations, cover art and murals. The illustrations are characterized by a style which translates classic poster art into a modern and timeless look. His pared back environments provide an elegant simplicity that delivers a concise narrative message.

Mads has been working as an illustrator and designer since 2001 and has collaborated with numerous multinational clients. Clients such as Coca Cola, Orangina, San Diego Zoo, Lego, Monocle and Wired. He graduated from the Danish Design School in 2001. Since then, has been working independently as an illustrator. Occasionally working as a lecturer at design schools.

More links:
madsberg.dk
Behance

illustration
posters

Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/setting-up-your-pymongo-environment/

This article was originally published on MongoDB. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

In this article, we’ll introduce developers to programming MongoDB using the Python programming language. PyMongo is the name of the client library (in MongoDB speak we refer to it as a “driver”) we use to interact with the MongoDB Server.

To get started we need to install the toolchain used by a typical MongoDB Python developer.

Installing m

First up is m. Hard to find online unless your search for “MongoDB m”, m is a tool to manage and use multiple installations of the MongoDB Server in parallel. It is an invaluable tool if you want to try out the latest and greatest beta version but still continue mainline development on our current stable release.

The easiest way to install m is with npm the Node.js package manager (which it turns out is not just for Node.js).

$ sudo npm install -g m
Password:******
/usr/local/bin/m -> /usr/local/lib/node_modules/m/bin/m
+ m@1.4.1
updated 1 package in 2.361s
$

If you can’t or don’t want to use npm, you can download and install directly from the GitHub repo. See the README there for details.

For today we will use m to install the current stable production version (4.0.2 at the time of writing).

We run the stable command to achieve this.

The post Setting up Your PyMongo Environment appeared first on SitePoint.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/1stwebdesigner/~3/l4-ju5iGb78/

Marketers are always looking for innovative ways to broaden their reach and increase conversions. It can be challenging to find the right targeting strategies for the customers you want to attract.

When you’ve worn through all the tricks in your marketing toolbox, try tapping into your influencers for help.

These individuals and independent operations cultivate dedicated followings by providing consistent, relevant content to their audiences. If your business model appeals to one or more niche markets, partnering with an influencer is a great way to skyrocket interest in your brand quickly.

Instant Access to a Wide Audience

When you start a digital marketing campaign, the planning phase should focus on developing profiles of the types of customers you aim to capture. Casting a wide net at a mildly interested audience can succeed at times, but in the early days of a startup, or for companies working in narrowly focused niches, targeted marketing is much more effective.

An influencer who releases content relevant to your niche is a fantastic doorway to thousands or more potential customers. An influencer may be a single person operating a blog or YouTube channel, or it may be an independently operated podcast or talk show channel with several members.

The best influencers take it upon themselves to explore their niches and deliver authentic, original content to their audiences. Having one create content about your brand, products, or services is a fantastic way to attract leads and build your following.

Authenticity is crucial. The influencer should be keen to share your offerings with the audience after recognizing the value of your work. While you reap the benefits of instant access to a potentially vast audience, the influencer can easily produce fresh new content using your brand.

Eventually, the honest feedback influencers provide about your brand builds your credibility and makes their audience more likely to share what you have to offer with others.

Return on Investment

Marketing is a constantly evolving field, and marketing professionals need to continually reassess the efficacy of their budgets. If an element of a marketing campaign isn’t generating enough revenue to justify its operating cost, it may be time for a change. Return on investment (ROI) is crucial, and influencer marketing can offer up to eleven times the ROI of most other digital marketing techniques.

Take the time to research the influencers in your niche before approaching anyone. If you want to generate the most ROI, you must carefully plan your influencer-driven content. Some examples include:

Product reviews. Provide influencers with samples of your products for review. This is incredibly common in the video game industry, where countless YouTube channels devoted to game reviews cumulatively report billions of views per month. Developers can easily get their games in front of millions of potential players at a very low cost. This generates excitement about upcoming and new releases and encourages engagement within the community.
Demonstrations. Invite influencers to use your services or products as demonstration videos or how-to guides. Modern consumers enjoy informative and instructional content, and this builds engagement among viewers, influencers, and your brand.
Giveaways. Consider providing influencers with several free samples of your products they can use in giveaways and contests. These events are easily shareable across social media outside the influencer’s audience, potentially increasing your brand reach even further. The influencer will enjoy the additional recognition and audience growth, as well.
Audience participation. Your influencer may create a hashtag or other trending submission format for the audience to share experiences. User-generated content is incredibly valuable, recyclable, and leads to happy customers. Modern consumers appreciate making connections with brands, not just making solid purchases. By asking for their feedback and using it wisely, you can generate consistently relevant and valuable content. Again, this is another win-win for you and the influencer.

While some influencer relationships may grow out of mutual benefit, you need to compensate your influencers in some way. You can pay them for their time, but it’s important to consider modern consumers’ attitudes toward sponsored content. Label directly sponsored content appropriately to avoid questions about your content’s credibility – bear in mind that many audience members will doubt the influencer’s sincerity if they know you paid for the content.

An alternative could be to offer influencers a commission based on the sales they bring you, but there are other options, as well.

Product-based companies should consider giving influencers free or discounted products, especially for giveaways. You should be confident in your products, so ask the influencer to do honest reviews about them. You may not always get perfect marks, but consumers appreciate honesty and transparency.

Your influencer can enjoy the free or discounted products, and the audience will appreciate a steady stream of honest content.

Finally, you can cross-promote. Influencers want to build their reach as much as you do – their livelihood depends on maintaining an audience. Give your influencers shout-outs or recommend their channels to your own audience.

Additionally, you may already have quite a bit of social media reach, yourself, so sharing the influencer’s content through your own network will likely benefit you both.

Finding the Right Influencer

Once you decide how to proceed with your influencer-driven content campaign, it’s time to choose the right channels. Start by defining the context of your content – what type of audience is going to want to know about you? You need an influencer whose tone works for your brand image, as well.

There are many humorous YouTube channels with millions of followers, but some companies don’t work on certain channels. Find influencers who cater to your ideal customers and tailor your content accordingly.

Influencers with millions of followers likely receive countless sponsorship and content creation requests, so you may want to start with a few smaller outlets before moving on to influencers with larger audiences. For example, there are countless video game “let’s play” channels on YouTube.

A few have millions of subscribers, but there are also dozens with thousands of dedicated fans. In many cases, consumers will follow several channels in a niche, so gaining traction in one can easily spread to others organically.

Eventually, the larger influencers will take notice, and gaining access to their larger audience numbers should be much easier for you.

Let Audiences Opt in to Your Brand

One of the most valuable aspects of influencer marketing is that audiences choose their influencers. They opt in to what influencers have to offer, so the interest is already present. If you can establish value to the influencer, you’ll build recognition and credibility quickly among the audience. Loyal audiences will want to hear what influencers have to say about your brand.

The relationships you cultivate with influencers can pay off dramatically. You may even develop long-term brand advocacy relationships that benefit your influencers as much as you for years to come. Thoughtful planning, stellar content, and painstaking research into the influencers in your market will help your influencer-driven content flourish, and cultivate your brand recognition faster than most other digital marketing techniques.

However, it’s important to remember the other elements of your marketing campaign when working on your influencer-driven content. Marketing trends change without warning, and you should always look for new ways to provide potential customers with your content.

As your influencer campaign grows, always be on the lookout for new ways to leverage your access to this new, wider audience through other marketing efforts, like your social media presence and email lists.

Once you build a strong bond with an influencer, you’ll grow to share audience members, and may even introduce one another to new prospects and leads. In time, you and your influencers will forge new business relationships and build even more resonance and credibility among potential consumers.

Encourage transparency, authenticity, and quality in your influencer-driven marketing campaign, and you’ll quickly understand why influencer marketing is so powerful.

Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2018/09/6-ways-to-speed-up-slow-clients/

Frustrated with your client? Beginning to wish you’d never taken this job on in the first place? Do you just need some feedback so that you can move forward?

Picture it: You’ve managed to land a great gig with a well-paying client and you can’t wait to get started and produce some of your best web design work…But then days elapse into weeks and the project just isn’t moving forward. The client replies to you sporadically, doesn’t fully answer your questions, and seems mega evasive.

This sometimes happens. Hey, things come up and get clients get busy. The problem is that you have requirements too, and a “busy” client is killing your schedule and your motivation.

So what do you do?

There’s no need to bail out just yet. In this article, we’re going to take a look at how you can speed up the whole process with slow clients.

1. Don’t Ask Too Much From a Client

If you’ve created multiple different designs for your client to review, plus you’ve got a few new color scheme ideas that you need to run by them, understand that this sort of feedback is heavy going and can overwhelm a busy client.

We know that it’s the client’s project that you’re working. And while you’d think they should be always available to check up on their project, clients often have several things on the go at once.

From now on, you need to take some responsibility. Is it necessary to have a client check every little thing that you do? Or can you get away with slimming down the amount of feedback that you need? If you can, do that.

A good client doesn’t want to—and shouldn’t have to—micromanage you. If you’ve got a massive list of things you want feedback on, find a way of narrowing it down. If you really do have eight templates to show them, cut them back to five.

Take some responsibility and don’t put too much on a client’s plate.

2. Clarify Issues as Soon as Possible

When clients give you a brief, they’ll typically ask if you have any questions. Instead of thinking “No, I’ll be okay for now,” or “I can ask a question at a later date,” use their invitation to ask questions right there and then.

A client might be available to answer at the time, but they might not be as available later on.

Moreover, asking for clarity as soon as possible means that you can just crack on with the job.

If there is something that you aren’t clear about, ask as soon as you can. That way, you can both move forward.

3. Set Expectations

From the start, you could explain to the client that you value, and expect good communication and feedback, and that these things help you to stay motivated and on track.

Of course, you’re also aware that you can’t talk to the client all the time, so why not schedule a brief weekly “catch-up/feedback session” to discuss the project and where you are at?

At the beginning of your project, it’s also important that you lay out what you can do and what you cannot do. Perhaps your client owns an eCommerce store for example and wants marketing services but you only design websites. Let them know this at the beginning to avoid disappointment.

4. Get Them Excited About the Project

It stands to reason that the more excited a client is about a project, the more they’ll want to talk about it, and the faster they’ll respond to your questions.

The easiest way to get a client excited about a project is to deliver your best work. If you deliver a draft that you know is second-rate, their own enthusiasm, motivation and passion for the project might take a dip.

Worse still, it weakens your relationship with them.

Instead of delivering a draft just for the sake of delivering a draft, hand in only your best work. Refine and tweak until you know that what you’ve got is so good that a client will be excited enough to respond and tell you what to do next.

The best thing is, that if a client sees the awesome work you’ve delivered so far, they’ll be so excited to see the end result that they’ll encourage you to stay on track.

5. Show your Own Passion For This Project

If a client can see that a freelancer or agency is super passionate about their project, it fires their own passion.

Rather than a client inspiring you, you can inspire the client!

How so?

A great idea is to get them excited about the tools you’ll be using for this project. Perhaps you could shoot them a message that goes a little like this:

“Hey! So, I’ve been mapping out this project, and wanted to show you some of the awesome tools I’m going to be using. For example, check out this neat POS that’s going to help your clients pay both online and offline.” Or you could show them examples of chatbots that you are going to implement on their website. You could also offer them the option to install a page builder.

Clients want to see you take an interest in their project. By showing your passion, you might be able to speed them up. Pretty soon they’ll be thinking, “Hey, this person really cares about my project. Perhaps I should start prioritizing it some more.”

6. The Follow up Email

If your client becomes unresponsive you must send an effective follow up email.

First, though, don’t become panicked by your clients lack of response. Don’t make assumptions about their thought process. You don’t want your email to come across as naggy.

The point of sending a follow up email is to move the process forward so that you can take further action on the project. Explain this to your client. Let them know that their lack of response may push back the project deadline, which can affect a variety of other projects either directly or indirectly.

It’s also best to have a single point of contact. If you require feedback from 4 different members of staff at a company, its going to be extremely difficult to get approval from each of them.

Conclusion

These are some ways to speed up the web design process with slow clients. All in all, though, there will be times when you’ll just need to have some patience. Clients don’t mind being nudged from time to time, but busy people don’t like to be nagged. Put our tips in place and have some patience with your clients.

 

Featured image via DepositPhotos.

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