February 4, 2016 by radii
Communication! It always comes back down to communication, doesn't it? Communication is at the heart of healthy client relationships for a reason: it involves skills--skills that require years to develop--and emotional labour. Emotional labour demands that you are 100% committed to the client and the topic at hand, building genuine trust through empathy and kindness.
It's a human tendency to try to reduce business down to numbers and cold hard mechanics, but it's an exercise in futility: the result is always a far stretch from the truth of business. Good business requires good relationships, which is a human art. Confidence, trust, bravery to progress through the economy--these things support good client relationships. They take time and patience to develop. Here are five key areas to focus on to improve your client and vendor relationships.
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How many times have you brainstormed with your team, only to come out of the session with one mediocre, plausible idea? And when you reflect on how the meeting proceeded, you recall that there was one voice louder than all the others, very few competing points of views, lots of nodding heads, and more lunching than learning? You’re not alone. We’ve seen it and have even been a part of it ourselves. Welcome to what many believe to be the pitfalls of brainstorming.
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If you work in IT, or even in a department that is associated with IT, at some point you may be asked to take over a website or web application that you had no part in managing. You may have been in grade school for all that matters when it was installed, but somehow this landed on your plate and you are the go to person when it comes to the site questions. Even if it does not work the way the current world works, it may look like some hideous attempt at something leading edge. So congratulations--you are the proud new owner of a “Legacy Website"!
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Stories may be the single most powerful way to convey an idea to another human being. At its most fundamental, it's not only how we learn about the world around us, it's how we interpret it and teach it to others. Metaphors and descriptions spark understanding in a way that plain-and-dry data never can. But although Story itself is rarely disputed as a powerful way to educate and humanize tedious subjects, it's often overlooked as a method to improve the user experience of websites today.
For the web industry, storytelling by design is a growing interest of many designers. But why? Do cookie-cutter websites really leave anything left to be desired? And moreover, can storytelling by design have a practical purpose beyond subjective aesthetics?
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