When going to a supermarket, it often amazes me how many different choices and varieties of products we are being presented with. I guess the variety makes sense, after all, as consumers in America we are usually being told that more is better. For clients shopping for design, this would be a bad thing. And they might not even know it.
How many design options should you present to a client? Some designers insist on showing one, as they feel there is only one perfect solution. Others insist on showing them all. The best approach might lie somewhere in the middle.
Let’s take a logo for example. I have played around with both ideas. Initially I always limited the concepts that I showed to three. I thought it was a healthy number, and from asking around and presentations in past places of employment, it seemed to be somewhat of a norm.
Then, I went through a phase were I showed anything that had some merit within the design criteria. Not that I woke up one morning deciding that this is what I had to do, it was basically what one of my clients asked for. And since I believe in an open relationship with my clients I thought, “Well, I have the explorations done, so why not show them. If nothing else, my efforts will impress them, and some questions that otherwise would come up, could be answered by example.”
To be honest, when I showed three options, I felt as if I was not showing the client that I had spent a substantial effort on coming up with these three options, therefore not showing them enough of the explorations and challenges that led to the three. Since, in essence, I bill my clients for time spent, I saw a benefit in showing more.
Needless to say, when I showed about 35 options, clients were amazed… and usually overwhelmed. But while they were impressed with the effort, it was nearly impossible for them to make a selection out of all the options — 35 options caused a problem. With three options on the other hand, things were easier.
Looking back, this makes sense, of course, as part of our job is to guide our clients in the right direction. I think it is our responsibility to preselect the few, most appropriate designs. Further, narrowing our selection down, will show confidence and expertise — exactly the things many clients will be looking for.
And it’s not just that way in our field, examining choice in the decison making process, the september issue of Negotiation offers the following: “…One explanation is that most of us just aren’t mentally capable of weighting all the possibilities. According the the old ‘seven plus or minus two’ rule of short-term memoery, we can hold only so many newly presented bits of information in our mind at a time — for most people, somewhere between five and nine items.”
So do your clients a favor: explore as much as you’d like, but present a digestable selection. Chances are you will save yourself and your client valuable time.
Always three options. Always. It is the extremely rare case where anything other than three would be necessary.
If it's a case of validating the work I've done for them, I can usually talk through that. To me it's seemed to be more important to be able to directly discuss that issue rather than overwhelm them with options to imply it. We don't want to get sidetracked and waste anybody's time. I usually cringe if, as in Peter's case, the client asks to see all the options. There are reasons I don't show them those other comps. Just as Paul Rand had a reason for showing Steve Jobs all the logo options leading to the final one for NeXT in his presentation book.
Heh, actually for fun I did take the Rand approach with one of my clients recently. But it was appropriate at the same time. Unfortunatley since it was an all or nothing gamble, the client didn't like the final logo. However, since he's a friend of mine and I'm not charging him either, I still have the account.
Nice discussion piece Peter, I think we've all gone through that learning phase of knowing and trusting ourselves well enough to be comfortable with what we are showing the client.
On Sep.22.2004 at 12:55 PM