It's never what you do, it's how you do it

After about 2 years of experience with web development and customer relations I think I've finally understood how to deal with people who don't really know what they want. The bad thing is they often believe they do know what they want. But they don't.

Many people come to me and ask me to implement a specific solution. I'm cool with that (at least I used to be) and everything goes smoothly until the customer receives beta version of the application. Suddenly they realize that their idea of a solution doesn't really fit well into the real world problems. So what they do is ask to make some "small" changes in the logic of the application. The problem is that those "small" changes end up being huge, costly and time consuming. If you've ever been responsible for customer relations I bet you know what I'm talking about.

Conclusions? The first questions to ask are: what is the problem we're trying to solve? Why do we need to solve it? Maybe this problem is just a result of a different problem, which should be fixed first? Why do we choose this solution?

Good understanding of the problem is the key to quick and effective solution. The more questions you ask the more time it will save you later on. It is extremely important to listen to the customer and know exactly what he/she needs. Usually you'll be the person who needs to decide what to do, not your customer, especially when you're dealing with non-tech people. Your customers will have some kind of internal feelings about available solution schemes, but they will have a hard time expressing themselves. Ask a lot of simple questions, try to explain potential consequences of their choice, MAKE NOTES. Try to choose 2 up to 4 key qualities your customer pays most attention to. If the key point of application is ease of use don't put in a lot of unnecessary functionality. Keep things as simple as possible.

On thursday I have a meeting with a new customer at which we'll talk about customized online store. I'll try to stick to these simple rules and see how it goes.