With Valentine’s Day just passing and spending some much-needed quality time with my beautiful wife Karen, I came upon a revelation. The exciting, scary, life-affirming and sometimes exhausting experiences happening in my life at home as a new husband and father had new- found relevance for me as a senior user experience professional at Motivate Design.

1.We are Equals. With this sentiment of equality in a relationship, I felt like this seemed like a good place to start. ...

2 Think Positively about your Partner. ...

3 Spend Time Together. ...

4 Express Affection. ...

5 Say You're Sorry. ...

6 Find Compatible Partners. ...

7 Fall in Love Every Day.

After more than a decade of working within an in-house design team, I hit a point where I felt the need to take the next phase of my career in a new direction.

This desire to go from a large, multinational financial firm that housed its own internal UX team to a smaller, more nimble and surprisingly more diverse environment was for me like moving into a whole new world.

From the start, the language and day to day vocabulary was new. For example, the word “client” took on a completely new meaning.

Within my previous in- house experience, clients could have been considered more akin to a familial relationship–kind of like siblings.

Depending on the engagement, sometimes my team and I needed to play the older more responsible role in order to demonstrate thought leadership and direction.

However in other projects working with internal client/partners, we were looking to shake things up and so we were viewed as the snotty, bratty young’uns.

When I moved to an agency setting, I came to realize that relationships with our clients were different. Things felt more professional in that there was less of the older versus younger sibling power-play dynamic but rather, more of a courtship type of story arc.

Upon reflection, I began to wonder if that love-based relationship parallel could best describe the agency/client interaction. In true user experience fashion, I began to analyze and compare the ups and downs of this relationship.

Out of this exercise, I think I found a way new perspective on how I am now managing the exchange and work that I’m currently doing for our clients and thought it would be helpful to share:

1.We are Equals
With this sentiment of equality in a relationship, I felt like this seemed like a good place to start. From a business perspective, I’m not saying that if you are a small agency the only way to establish a true partnership is to work with small clients. Rather, the angle from which I am thinking aligns more in terms of attitude. If your client is treating, you like a “paid subservient” then you are not working as equals towards a solution.

On the other hand, if you look at your clients from a point of view of disdain or that their contributions are not worthy of your time, then you too are operating on a platform of inequality which does the opposite of the agency/client goal of building a trusted, lasting engagement.

2. Think Positively about your Partner
This can often be a tough one. In any relationship personalities and points of view can encounter some friction. Similar to a courtship, it means that over time you find things about your client that may irk you which if left unaddressed can then be a point of distraction. As these bumps in the road happen, it is imperative that they are seen as opportunities for improvement.

Rather than taking a negative outlook on a person or a group, recognize and address the issue immediately for the sake of the project and the relationship as a whole. While sometimes difficult, taking the importance of communicating frequently and working it out together seriously speaks volumes. It ensures to your client that you care and you believe that anything can be resolved.

3. Spend Time Together
While it is not fully clear who is responsible for the famous quote: “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” , I can say for sure that he or she never had a bi-coastal relationship much less ran a user experience agency. In the few hundred years since this quote first came into modern consciousness, everyone from Sigmund Freud to Dr. Phil would attest that the best way to foster a relationship is through face-to- face interaction.

While this may not always be feasible, I would encourage agency/client engagements to always use the best technology available in order to be together. Therefore, the preference would go as follows: in-person meetings are better than video conferences which are better than phone calls and are far more recommended than an email whenever possible. When dating, you would eventually want that special person to see where you live and meet your family.

Similarly, invite your clients to your studio to meet the extended team and see “where the magic happens.” If budget and timing allows, go to your client’s home base in order to get a sense of the people and culture that would likely inform your decision making on a project. Finally establish a preference of delivering a final product or even difficult news in person engaging on a more personal level as opposed to being the mystery voice on a conference call.

4. Express Affection
Ok, let’s not get too weird here… Just like a romantic relationship, I am not suggesting you go tell your client that you love them right away (wait until at least after a couple of dates and the check clears :-)), but I would encourage that you go out of your way to show how excited you are to be working with them. At Motivate Design, our core values stress the importance of this mindset

through and through:
WE ALL DRIVE — Speaks to the importance of shared responsibility for all relationships both among team members as well as with our clients YES, AND… — Draws inspiration from improv through working with each other and looking for ways to over-deliver and delight
EXPLORE, DESIGN, REFLECT & REFINE — Demonstrates the core of what we do and the joy that we derive from delivering it to our clients
DELIVER EXCELLENCE — Encourages us to always be proud of who we are and what we are about through our end results
GROWTH THROUGH POSITIVE INTERACTIONS — Leans on age-old belief systems that building good relationships and doing right by people isn’t just good karma — it’s good business

5. Say You’re Sorry
As previously established, things don’t always go smoothly in life and everything is not always going to be hunky-dory. Having been in my fair share of relationships in the past, humility was a hard-earned but extremely valuable lesson that I’ve since adopted in my life. As a user experience professional, you need to be mentally and emotionally prepared to pivot so that when issues arise you have support systems to lean on and you don’t do or say something that will sour the relationship irreparably. As a general rule of thumb, we try to establish ground rules at the outset through kick-off meetings so that everyone starts off on the right foot. Then, abide by them and be prepared adjust and recognize mis-steps when appropriate in order move past the issues together.

6. Find Compatible Partners
Ask any love expert and they will say that chasing after the wrong type of person for you is the first mistake of any soon-to-be relationship. All of the points covered above can only lead to something successful if we start relationships with clients that we are compatible with and for the right reasons. The first step in doing this is something that the team here at Motivate Design has been working on which is based on the ancient Greek maxim “know thyself.” Over the span of a person or business’ lifetime, it is important to take into account who you are and what you represent. In our case, Motivate Design has gone through great change in the nearly seven years of its existence. We needed to identify how we had grown and if what we had been trying to do was still reflective of our values.

From there, we could then align on the opportunities in front of us and the clients associated with them to determine if there was a potential “Love Connection.” In taking the time to understand who you are and then getting to know the right clients before starting a given project only strengthens the chances for success in any relationship. Conversely, go out of your way to make sure that your client knows you are more than just a pretty face, go beyond the capabilities deck to demonstrate some of the intangibles that makes you the right fit.

7. Fall in Love Every Day We’ve all seen them, the television segment every Valentine’s Day where a local news broadcast spotlights an 80 year-old couple that has been married for over fifty years.

The question always asked of these special lovebirds is “what is the secret?” Invariably, these couples talk about keeping their hearts and eyes open to all of the qualities and potential for happiness that they saw when they first met.

This is something that I think that we can all aspire to in our business relationships–to start every day looking for ways to fall in love with your client all over again. But what does that mean? It means that each day, each client engagement, each opportunity is a gift and that you are meant to be doing great work for clients who are special to you for all the right reasons. If not, why do it?

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Do you have a great client engagement story or one that went terribly wrong? Share them with us in the comments below or on Twitter@hypesloadedmedia! You can also say “Hello!” on Facebook.