Working with clients isn’t easy. The disconnect between you, programmer-designer-messiah, and them, unreasonable dictator-at-times, will always be there.

But not all clients are difficult. The better ones, the ones we want to keep for the entirety of our consulting careers, the ones we hope will always have new projects and new ideas ready to serve us at a moment’s notice, all seem to have one thing in common.

Great clients put the application above themselves. When the application is the most important part of the project, everything else falls into place. Each feature decision can be scrutinized by simply asking the question, “Does this make the application better?” Feelings and personal objectives, both ours and the clients, aren’t what dictate the outcome. When the product is not put at the forefront, clients will justify a feature request by other measures:

• “...it’s something cool I saw on another site.”

• “...because it’s 1996, and everyone is using <blink> and a counter!”

• “...because it’s 2005, and everyone is using RSS.”

• “...because it’s 2009, and everyone has a Facebook and Twitter badge.”

• “...because my usability book told me that content below the fold never gets read!”

• “...because our CEO loves pink!”

At the beginning of the client relationship, establish the goals of the application. Decide, together, what the end product is hoping to achieve—and write it down. Doing this turns ammo like “cool” and “cutting-edge” into blank bullets. Establishing goals lets you say “no” with more conviction.