For website developers, it’s not so pleasant when clients review your designs and return with a ton of changes to the site without any solid reasons behind their decisions on doing so.

Initially, they seemed pleased with the designs, you presented everything to them, delivered all the requirements they needed, and put your best team on the project. However, for some reason, your concepts get rejected by the clients, and you have no idea why.

Here are some of the reasons why your clients don’t trust your design concepts, Read on to find out more about this common occurrence in the website development industry.

You didn’t involve your clients in the conceptualization stage

When creating design concepts as a website designer in Singapore, alot of effort and time goes into the wireframing, and sketching stages, which is something every design team is aware of. Do our clients know this? Unfortunately not, in most cases. Due to lack of communication in these early stages of design, many gaps appear and cause issues when delivering projects.

How do we solve this issue at Able It? For starters, we involve our clients in every step of the UX design to reduce the possibility of the concepts being rejected, as the clients have much more involvement in them, as they were practically part of the team. As a general rule, from the requirement gathering stage, some members of the client’s team will be part of the decision making process.

Expectations Of the Client were not managed well enough

From a simple Google search, you will be able to find countless articles and resources on managing client expectation, especially for digital marketing agencies and web development shops. Who’s job is it to manage the client’s expectations in your agency?

Is the role clear? As a general rule, this falls onto the project managers or account executives, and the design team should in no way be involved with this, leaving them to do what they do best. Here are some pointers that we can use.

Your team didn’t do enough competitive analysis research

As agencies, it’s no longer sufficient to design based on our whims and fancies, or by researching Behance, Dribble, Pinterest and other similar sites for design inspiration.

We have to also keep up with the competition, and sometimes this involves a little analysis of our competitor’s behaviours, by doing good research on them and their websites, their landing pages, and even their user interface workflows.

Should you choose to ignore this aspect, when delivering the final product, you may find that some of your clients may be disappointed, as they themselves are consistently looking up on their competitors’ sites.

Are your designs simple enough?

When creating prototypes and concepts, we often get carried away and include bells and whistles (design additions) that are not necessary.

Remember, the goal of every website, especially for consumer and ecommerce websites, is to be able to convert as many users as possible into paying customers.

Keep the designs simple, and the clients will love you for it.

Lack Of Strategy In Site Architecture

Overlooking planning the site strategy is the most commonly overlooked task that most development agencies are guilty of doing these days. Why would this lack of strategy affect your client’s trust towards your design concepts? Take for example, the homepage, or a landing page that gets high traffic volume for the client. Without a deep understanding of how the client’s business works, such as their target customer persona, user demographics, it’s almost impossible to design a website that’s worthy of acceptance by your clients.

This is why the strategy of planning the site together with your clients is extremely important in the UX design process.

The goal of the development team is to align the business goals of the client with the website.

A UX and site architecture strategy ensures that innovative approaches like storytelling and conversion rate optimization are utilized to ensure a site that generates a good return on investment for the client.

Summary

Although the web development industry is not new, it still remains a huge challenge to ensure that your clients are in line with your design concepts. Be aware of every step of communication with your clients, use collaboration software such as Avocode, Invisionapp, and others, and try to use prototyping software in order to be able to obtain fast feedback from your clients.

As you already may know, web design projects should be largely collaborative efforts between the agency and the clients.