I had the chance to spend an afternoon working at Designing Interactive (D-I) this past week. It was a good time. Not the most productive afternoon, but sometimes a little unproductivity one day can bear fruit down the road.

I was chatting with a local developer working co-working in the conference room and he was telling me about his new freelancing business. I asked him what would separate his business from others already out there. Without blinking he said he would focus on speed and quality, or basically offering better service than everyone else. Makes sense, that's pretty much what I've done and it's worked really well.

Afterwords I got to thinking about what better service means to web designer/developers. Traditionally I thought it meant when a client calls and tells you to jump you ask "How High?". When I started freelancing fulltime about a year ago I was going to be the fastest most responsive guy you could hire. My service was going to be top notch. You want a red butterfly instead of orange I'll get it to you in an hour. What I've learned is that isn't what people really want. A quick turnaround is appreciated, but what they really want is quality. Quality comes from understanding what the client needs and the client understanding how you plan on meeting those needs.

I find myself spending hours every day just explaining why I made the decisions I made. A lot of that time is spent telling them why I don't want to make the changes they sent over. I do it professionally of coarse. It's part of the dialoge that you build on successful projects.

Every design is going to have changes. If I get a list of things to change I try and understand why each one is being made. Some changes completely change the tone or structure of a layout. Usually if you talk it thought you can figure out why a change is being made and offer up a better solution.

It's natural for a client to try to solve problems they see in a design, they know their business inside and out, but I'm the profesional with years of design experience. I'm the one they hired to solve the problem. The end result is so much better when you take the time to help them solve their problems instead of just making whatever changes get sent over. That is service and that's what drives my business.