When you ask your designer to do something and they ask why, they’re doing their job. The ensuing conversation is invaluable in helping them solve the problem correctly. The two of you can probably come up with a better solution than either of you could have done individually.

Successful design projects need equal participation from the client and the designer. Yet the design process remains a mystery to the people who buy it. Design isn’t sausage. You’ll enjoy it even more if you understand how it’s made.

A well-designed world is a better world. I love knowing that a thoughtful piece of user interface makes someone’s life go a bit easier, whether it’s designing a menu that’s accessible to someone with low vision or watching my seventy-one-year-old father intuitively use an iPad for the first time. Good design has the power to change lives in big and

If a designer shows you work in progress, it’s a great sign. It means they’ve moved beyond a fear that all you’ll see is the broken stuff to a willingness to collaborate with you. Look at it in the spirit of collaboration. Ask questions about what they’re showing. Talk about where they’re headed with it. Feel free to ask if there’s any feedback the

The goal of this phase is that you jump up in your chair and scream, “Yes! That’s it right there. Make it like that!” Be prepared for that moment to take a few iterations, which are normal parts of the process. A designer who nails something right out of the gate isn’t good—they’re lucky. A designer who works with you, listens to your feedback, pay

If the project is big enough, you may have a couple of payments due at agreed-upon milestones, with a final payment on completion. I advise designers to define completion as something within their control. For example, if your designers are delivering front-end code for your internal team to implement, completion should be defined as the delivery o

The most crucial thing we discover is how you work as a team. We need to know how many people actively publish to or maintain the website, and how much time they commit to it. We also need to know their skill sets. Any decent design solution takes your resources into account.

So when a client says, “We want tons of big photos,” my next question is,

Design isn’t magic and it isn’t art. It’s a craft. Design solves a problem within a set of given constraints. We’ll talk about why those constraints matter. Much as a doctor needs patients to practice their craft, a designer needs clients to practice theirs. Like walking into a doctor’s office, describing what’s wrong, and then having your doctor d

If something isn’t working, point it out and go into as much detail as possible as to why. Tie it to the goals we agreed to earlier in the project. Understanding your reasoning is critical to solving the problem. Being told to do something a certain way, or worse, getting a comp of it done that way only means we have to reverse-engineer the whole t