While student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I became friends with Carl Rogers, who was respected as one of the leading psychotherapists of his time. He taught me much about the art of listening.

Dr. Rogers said that when we listen, and people know we are listening, it shows we truly care about them. In turn, they will respond by caring about you. It opens communication and also opens hearts. When we accept them as a person, unconditionally, they will be more kind to you.

We should listen without preconceptions, without anticipation and without judgement if we want others to portray what they truly feel. We listen with all our senses, not just to the words which are said. Some people cannot fully express themselves while speaking, so we must try to see them as they see themselves. We should watch for non-verbal clues as to what they really mean: facial expressions, body movements, etc.

While we should show positive regard for the other person, we should also demonstrate our own positive self-regard. We do not react to their negative comments, verbally or physically, even when we disagree with them. When they do ask for our opinion, however, we should respond with our true thoughts and in specifics rather than generalities. We offer our own perspective as other options rather than as contradictions.

Listening might seem quite passive as opposed to speaking. It is actually very active. To paraphrase Bobby Kennedy, “I learn while listening. When I talk I don’t learn too much.” If you think talking helps to spread your own wisdom, you are not really wise.

@sarah – I can understand the ego thing. However the designer does know about design and how to design. Just like a writer can write. However any good design must look at every aspect of the design. Does it support the clients business, does it support the audience, does it reinforce the organisations web site objectives. If it doesn’t – cut it. We are not building artworks, people have to remember that.

Notice I have not said what the client wants, sometimes what the client wants is against the organisations web site objectives. Designers and UX people are often left to realign these two or at least bridge the gap.

You’ve raised some excellent points in this post. First, it’s always important to be client-centric. You can produce a first-rate product but if it doesn’t meet the client’s needs (which could be a matter of taste, as well) then it’s not really a useful product. The same is true in copywriting.

What I do see often is far too much ego invested in a design (or document) intended for a customer. Anyone involved in the creative side of business needs to develop a thick skin and honestly assess the needs of the client, not what we think they need. I’ve met many businesses who are a little afraid of their design people. To me, that’s a sign of a diva or prima donna at work. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been asked to develop web copy and warned about how difficult it is to work with the designer.

I think you’re on to something here. If you start to reveal the process to the client, failures and all, they will have a better appreciation for how much they’re getting when they see the end product.

May I add another dimension to the question? It goes like this: perhaps the web will one day become so embedded in our personal and business lives that most people, most of the time, will no longer consciously think about it. A bit like today, when we walk into a room and flick the light switch without thinking about all the resources and infrastructure involved in generating and delivering the electricity.

My point? – no, more of a question really – will the day come when the ill-defined web industry as we know it today no longer exists? This might be the natural outcome of web stuff becoming more efficient, generic and easy to use, and having a generation or two that has grown up using the web and assimilating much of the skill and knowledge that is in the province of specialists today.

With more involvement in the design process our clients, and indeed the designer, can feel at greater ease, and be confident that the direction being taken is the best one. This involves client and designer regularly sharing reasons for why things should be as they are.

It does leave the door open however to some possible sticky moments along the way but as you have suggested, if your clients are not pushing the creative process then everything should be fine.

Which leads me to the following question, how do we explain to our clients that they shouldn’t push the design process?

You have to get them just right. You are really looking at responses that will mean or be weighted equally overall across the audience, ones with a good statistic spread. However they also have to give a preferential bias for each audience group.

Otherwise having alternative responses that are just additional filling is a waste of time. Maybe this is even the wrong style of question for the information you want to capture in this case.

What is survey experience, if over 5 surveys your boss has discovered that the data was biased, that mistakes were made. And on the subsequent survey they improved their skills and technique.

Then yes they are on the way.

But if they just repeated the same skill set with no real thought. Then reality is they aren’t gaining experience.

It’s the old adage: 10 years at a job = 1 years experiences repeated 10 times.

Sadly I know that the business world is not black and white and if I stand up here on a soapbox and say – “DON”T do it”, people will anyway. So better to educate them a little in the ways of doing it correctly.

What I see too often are choices like:
– it’s OK
– it’s acceptable
– it’s good
– it’s bad
– it’s great

When poorly written choices are scrambled, there’s no way to know how the author differentiates “OK” and “acceptable”. Of course, the ideal solution is to not have poorly written choices, but leaving the choices in order helps protects against problems from poorly written choices.

I would really, really like to see a stronger post that outright says “If you design your own survey and you don’t have years of task-specific training, you are introducing unacceptable bias and error and your survey data is mostly useless.” As this post stands, I can’t send this post to my boss because he’ll think that having done 5 surveys in the past counts as “survey experience”, which means he’s safe to keep doing what he’s doing.

Eg. Q1 is multichoice, Q2 is likert scale, Q3 is open text, Q4 likert scale, Q5 “rank these” grid, Q5 yet-another-format, Q6 omgwtfbbq my brain just melted.