If you’ve contacted me regarding design work in the past 6 months, you’ve probably gotten a reply similar to this:
I rarely do design jobs these days, unless the client has a clear understanding that it’s very difficult to do accurate estimates for design work.
The time spent and resulting cost depends on how much you like the design, how many iterations we go through and how much detail is put into each element and piece of functionality in the site, etc.
I’d be happy to work on your project, but I really can’t give you more than a rather broad estimate; and I certainly understand if you don’t want to hire me because of this.
I hope this makes sense.
When doing design work, the project goes over the original estimate fairly often (mostly due to scope creep), and often the client doesn’t notice the expanding scope on a design job the way they do on a a more functionality focused development job. The client isn’t happy paying more than they expected, and I feel guilty for not doing a better job with my estimates – regardless of the actual reason for the overage.
Instead of design work, I’ve been doing functionality development gigs (when I’ve been accepting work). These often have a design component, but they are based on creating certain functionality, which is much easier for me to create a project plan and associated estimate.
Does anyone out there still do a lot of design work? How do you handle this?
The best way I’ve seen situations like this handled is to put a separate “Risks”-section in the contract and/or statement-of-work document. I have never seen a customer run away because we wanted to add a section like this, and bringing up this risk and having the customer understand that it will increase the cost and delay the project as early as possible has been much easier than bringing it up at a later stage. Example:
Risk:
Customer is not satisfied with initial design-drafts or has not specified in enough detail what the design requirements are.
Result:
Each design-draft increases the time spent in the [draft] phase of the project. The initial estimate for the [draft] phase is based on one iteration. Each additional iteration will add to the total estimate, thus delaying the project deadline with the same amount of hours, and increasing the total cost of the project .
I haven’t done it for awhile now, but when I did, the basic process for me was to have them send me several sites they do like and several they don’t, pinpointing exactly what they did and didn’t like about each. Then in the contract I would specify that I would create say … up to 2 layouts and I outlined “xx hours of graphic design”, “xx hours of custom scripting”, etc. Then I also stated an hourly rate if I began to go over in an area or the first 2 layouts didn’t please them. In general if the first 2 layouts didn’t please them they weren’t going to want to continue working with me due to the costs that would be involved. Which was fine with me because at that point, I was most likely not going to be able to achieve whatever it is they were wanting.
I just think it’s all about setting up hard time -> money expectations in the contract and keeping the client up to speed on how you’re doing with the time, etc. It lets you more easily go back and say it’s going to cost more money when scope creep happens.
I do a good amount of design work and run into this same thing. I start off by talking to the customer about the design process and how there could possibly be a lot of back and forth. Once I explained the process, I then give the customer an estimate and build in two rounds of back and forth. One major, and one minor. All major changes need to be addressed in the first round, and then any minor changes will be addressed in round two. If there needs to be any more back and forth, I make sure I let them know that that will be above the estimated price and then charge extra for that. We have all learned the hard way, and although this process is not perfect, it has helped. Lesson learned: good contracts are a must to help prevent scope creep.
It’s funny, I have to opposite problem. I’m a designer first and have trouble keeping projects that are programming heavy in scope. I believe that when a project creeps it’s as much my fault as it is the clients. It’s all about managing expectations. Maybe we should be working together!
I agree that a lot of this is managing expectations. However, my experience has been that a client generally does not view design work the same way they view development work.
My guess is that since they can see the results of the design work, they (consciously or unconsciously) give the work an estimated time – especially during scope creep. When asking, “can you just change X?” I find they generally have a time estimate of their own in mind already for design work – and less so for development work.
The fight against their internal time estimates is one that is very difficult to win.
I do everything in my power to not give a time estimate. I charge an hourly rate and try to do what I can to convince the client that a time estimate will just be wrong.
What I do is update my hours daily in Basecamp(or your weapon of choice) so the client can see how we are doing on hours. A lot of times this is a big deterrent for the client making huge changes because they can see how it runs up their cost in almost real time.
I’m very selective with my clientele now and I find that thats the most important step.
Yeah, that is true. People are more familar (or at least think they are) with the surface of design, everyone’s moved text around in word, etc. But coding php is totally foreign.
One thing that I find helpful is to never agree on changes right away. I always try to say “yeah, let me look into that and I’ll get back to you.” even if it’s a pretty small change. And if it’s really small I’ll wait until we’ve got a couple of other things on the ToDo list.
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I totally agree with you; and this kind of expectation by the clients is a our downside, as W-desiners and programmers – because after all you cannot design without coding the desing. What I do is I sugest them to see around at differents designs with their cms. and if they really want some thing different out of the box, then I try my best when it comes to work time.
althought, I always endup working a couple of free two per design.