Sometimes it's OK to fire your customers

Leading up to the birth of our first child, I made a real effort to make plenty of cash before the baby came and took on several web design gigs. But one in particular stands out not for the money it paid, but for the lesson it taught me about the customer being wrong.

It could have been a slam dunk: it was for a Montessori preschool that wanted six pages, clean design, all the usual stuff, pictures of their students and school.

"No problem," I thought. I could do that, and I'll make it better than any other Montessori school in the city. Roar.

Do you know Seth Godin? Of course you do. Obviously Seth can read my thoughts, because around the same time this web design gig came up, he wrote on his blog about The Customer is Always Right.

From Seth:

"If the customer is wrong, they're not your customer any more. In other words, if it's not worth making the customer right, fire her."

It started out pretty well, I thought. I got all the information, I looked at other sites they (she and her husband, who was overbearing and interrupted a lot) suggested, and then got to work. When I showed them my first working draft of a logo, they were less than thrilled.

They sent their logo back to me and said, "Use this instead." What was it? It was a less-than-cool-or-even-professional-looking-artwork they made in Microsoft Word combined with some odd clip art.

"No big deal," I thought. "I guess I can use that. It looks like crap, but they're the customer, and the customer is always right (because they were paying me)."

They wanted some type of navigation that allowed a type of "drop down" effect. Even though they really didn't have enough pages on their web site to merit that type of navigation, I made it work. Why? Well, because the customer is always right (because they were paying me).

When I showed them my interpretation of what they wanted, the floodgates opened. They then preceded to give me a complete mock up of their web site in Microsoft Word and told me, "We (again, why the husband had so much of a say in his wife's ideas for the web site is beyond me) want the site to look exactly like this."

"OK," I said. Why? Because the customer is always right (because they were paying me).

When everything was completed to those specifications, I sent the revised design to them. And yet again I got another e-mail with another Word document, with more changes.

"OK," I said to myself.

And then it hit me: I didn't need the money that bad. These people aren't listening to me. They've hired me to be the professional, and now they're micromanaging everything. Sadly, they didn't know anything about web design, usability, or information architecture. I was annoyed.

There are dos and there are don'ts, and everything they came up with - what they wanted and what my name was going to end up on - were the don'ts of web design. They didn't know what they were doing. They weren't listening to anything I was graciously trying to tell them about user experience, design and the web.

The customer was wrong.

So I fired them.

The sweet thing is, I did it in such a way that made them think it was their idea to "find someone else who better suited their needs." But the truth of the matter was, I wasn't going to work on that project anymore, because the money wasn't a fair exchagne for my loss of sanity.

When I got to the point that I didn't want my name on the project, I knew it was time to get out.

In the end, they got exactly what they wanted. Their web site has a 4.5 MB image on the front page (which, in the web world is huge, even with high-speed internet). The design hearkens to the glory days of the 1990s and Microsoft FrontPage.

And me? I got a valuable lesson. I know there are others out there who haven't learned it yet and are slaving away for a dollar and losing a bit of their soul in the process.

It doesn't have to be that way.