I read a nice article today over at the Customer Experience Design blog, which traced over a fairly well-drawn distinction between two schools of customer experience.

The two schools, given by example in this case are:

The "Ritz-Carlton Customer Experience Philosophy" [which] creates remarkable customer experiences through extraordinary benefits at extraordinary prices.

and

The "IKEA Customer Experience Philosophy" [which] creates remarkable customer experiences by reducing the sacrifice and costs that customers incur to experience a company's products and services.

Thinking about this, I started to wonder: How can you be the IKEA of web design firms? Working strictly from the definitions, it's easy: The IKEA of web design firms is your client's web-designing nephew. He's cheap, the benefits are basic, and his relatively uneducated customer's percieved value is high.

But, of course, that's not the whole story, because IKEA stuff is well-designed, it's broadly applicable, and (most importantly to the failure of my analogy) it's contemporary. IKEA is, at least to some degree, premised on the fact that its customers have some aesthetic taste.

Wait a second. My client's web-design nephew couldn't have come up with this.

Taking a look, it should become instantly clear that if you want to be IKEA, having IKEA's customer experience philosophy doesn't cut it. You also have to be a good designer. And this is a problem, as most designers recoil at the de facto idea for a web design IKEA analog, a template-driven web design business.

Here's what that tells me: templates are not the web design analog of what IKEA does. IKEA is based on customers combining cheap, well-designed elements to their own satisfaction. Which means there's still potentially a good web analog out there to be found.

And you can be sure that when the IKEA-of-web-design-firms-to-come comes, there's going to be a huge market right there waiting for them.

Most people are other people.
Their thoughts are someone else's opinions,
Their lives a mimicry,
Their passions a quotation.
— Oscar Wilde

We all want our clients to be happy. The engagement I was talking about Monday sticks out in my mind because it's the only one in my life where the client wasn't happy.

I have reflected, and I know I had a few things to learn about professionalism (and salesmanship, obviously). But what I felt then, and I still feel now, is that what's going to make everyone really happy is great results.

Now, great isn't easy. It isn't guaranteed. And we all need to eat, so that means we've got to know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em. But nobody ever got great by playing it safe. Trying to implement new ideas is risky business.

Every time we try to do something great, we gamble our reputations. Sometimes we get fired, and sometimes we have to resign. Maybe someday, somebody will shake their fist and yell, "You'll never work in this town again!" But listen: If we just wanted money, we'd have jobs writing code for Oracle or re-touching photos for Teen People, or as sub-bosses in a 1920s crime syndicate.

"Money, okay, everybody likes money. But somehow it don't seem like him."

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Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
— "Slammin'" Sam Beckett

This sounds all Zen and profound, but it really depends on how you define success.

Here is an actual situation that happend to us:

Some time back, we were designing some things for a client in a design area that was pretty much totally virgin territory for everyone involved. It was exciting for this reason.

The client and ourselves had a handful of meetings, after which we came up with some proposals, pitched them, and they were accepted. A plan of action was outlined and agreed upon. Talk around the table indicated that since we were in new territory, the best course was to just start pushing through the first couple of passes, and then re-evaluate.

About halfway through the project, Nick and I were up very late drinking bourbon, (attentive readers will notice this is somewhat of a motif) and we had the vaunted "Eureka!" moment. All of a sudden, the project made sense, and we had an actual, real solution right there in our hands.

First, the good news: It was still a real solution the next morning. We spent that day creating a presentation detailing the ways that our new proposal addressed all the concerns that the client had voiced, and flat-out solved the problem from a conceptual standpoint. We pitched it that same afternoon.

Now the bad news: The client felt it was best to continue building the original idea.

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Adaptive Path wrote a nice post a while ago answering a question they had been asked by a client. The client, showing uncommon wisdom, asked them "how they might make the most of [their - the client and AP's] design engagement."

This is a sort narcotic story for designers (or at least myself), who, qua Shirky's arrogant designer, fantasize about a world where clients ask us how they could make the most of our time. Unfortunately, it's a rare occasion when a client is going to ask you a question like that, much less be capable of hearing and internalizing the answer.

In the remainder of situations, unfortunately, our interactions with clients are going to be influenced by, if not symptomatic of, internal disorganization, a lack of project clarity, monetary shenanigans, or any combination of the three. This means more often than not, being a design professional means putting our ability to be humble to the test.

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