Determine Your Client’s True Goals Without Jumping to Conclusions

The Problem
When a client asks for a new website or a redesign of their existing site, it’s often difficult to get them to explain why. In many cases, they’re not even aware of the goals underlying their strategic choice to create a new website.

Once you determine the client’s true business drivers as well as the needs, habits and desires of their users, it may be evident that their strategic choice wasn’t the optimal solution. A common mistake is redesigning a site when all it really needed was a “realignment” of content.

A Solution
I recently discovered an interesting article, the first section of which provides what I believe to be a good method of soliciting more accurate information about a client’s goals. Open-ended questions typically generate detailed and descriptive answers – sometimes too much so. Fill-in-the-blank questions provide the guidance necessary to keep answers on-topic and to-the-point. This article suggests asking clients to fill in the following sentence:

“We want to [the means] because [the reason] so that [the end].”

The article also provides examples of how this question would look once completed:

1. “We want to increase traffic by 20% because we need more exposure so that we can generate eight more leads per month.”
2. “We want to update to a current look because we need to be more relevant to our customers so that we can raise our rates by 10%.”
3. “We want to write four industry-related articles per month because we want to help our industry so that we can form two partnerships per month.”

The Problem with the Solution
There is one problem with how this particular article has worded their guiding text. It starts with the strategy or “means”, working its way backward through the reasoning, before finally explaining the core goal or metric for success (the “end”). This is a problem because you can’t suggest a strategic plan until after you’ve determined the goals as well as the users’ needs.

One of the toughest parts of User Experience is selling it. With this in mind, why would we want to guide our clients to attempt to answer, without any background knowledge, expertise or research, the very question that market/user research is meant to answer? Allowing the client to arbitrarily demand a specific strategic direction gives them the false impression that this question is not only easy to answer, but that the work is already done since they’ve now answered it.

A Better Solution
While I agree that a fill-in-the-blank format is an excellent way to procure accurate information about a client’s goals, I would suggest the following alternate guiding sentence structure:

We want to [goal] because [reason]. We will consider our efforts successful if [metric].

Below are some examples of how this structure would look when completed. These examples are based strictly on the article’s three examples, previously listed above.

1. We want to gain more brand exposure because we are seeing a decrease in new customers. We will consider our efforts successful if we generate 8 more leads per month.
2. We want to be more relevant to our customers because we want to increase our prices. We will consider our efforts successful if we are able to raise our prices by 10% without impacting our current rate of sign-ups.
3. We want to help our industry because we need to build our reputation and brand equity. We will consider our efforts successful if we are able to form two partnerships per month.

The above alternate sentence structure makes no assumptions about a solution, nor does it ask the client to make these assumptions. It is critical to set clear goals from the start and approach a strategy with an open mind. This paves the way for user research and other aspects of User Experience to be welcomed into the overall process. It also increases the likelihood that the results of such practices will be fully taken into account to produce an optimal end product.