SUMMARY

Have you ever heard of Clients from Hell – the website that cites hellish stories designers collect over a lifetime of working with clients? If you haven’t, many of the situations described on the site won’t be foreign to you: clients who believe theirs is the only opinion that matters, who tell you which colors to use and ask to “make the logo bigger,” and who just don’t seem to get their head around what UX truly means. Clients being difficult is a well-known cliche in the design world.

There’s another side to all this: clients are also people who are deeply embedded within organizations we can help with our proficiency in design-thinking and user-centered design. They know their jobs, customers, and organizations so well that if we could just see eye to eye, we could make real impact together.

In her talk, Jenny will explore some insights from over a decade of working with clients. She will share practical examples of hands-on methods to explain, teach, and inspire user-centered thinking in clients who “just don’t get it.”

About Jenny

Evgenia (Jenny) Grinblo is a UX practitioner with a background in qualitative research and visual design. She leads the UX and Design team at award-winning mobile agency, Future Workshops, in London. An advocate of empathy in design, her work focuses on facilitating collaboration (in other words, getting clients to get their hands dirty and keeping developers happy). She speaks and writes about the importance of empathy when designing for users, and applying User Experience methods with little support, time or budget.

Jenny spends a lot of time on twitter and collects badly-written error messages on errorwallofshame.tumblr.com.