As a consultant, there are two clients on any given design project. One is the business that hired you. The other is the end user.

Both are important, but one matters more than the other.

Today, I was involved in a conversation about a company that intentionally maintains a poor user experience on its commerce site in the interest of driving people to call customer support. Once they call, those crafty customer support people can start in with the up-sells. You may have called to get a problem solved, but their hope is that you’ll spend some cash on a few other things before you hang up.

When posed with this insight into the company’s business model, one designer suggested that we perhaps feel some unease because the model appears to be in opposition to the best interest of the end user. He asked where that leaves us as designers. After all, the business is our client, not the end user, right?

Well, no.

The business that hires you does so for a reason: your design expertise. If you churn out designs based purely on what they want, you tell your client that you’re essentially a factory worker with a copy of Photoshop.

If you do what they hired you to do—be an expert on something—then you’re worth every penny, and you build your reputation and credibility.

Yes, you need the business to inform your decisions and share information about its market, audience, history, and so on. You need them to share their insights and ideas. You need to work together to achieve the goals of the project. But if those goals are aimed at anything other than a good end user experience, then you’re working for the wrong client. The people who sign your checks won’t have checks to sign unless they provide something valuable and good to their customers.

The businesses that hire you want you to be honest. They want you to tell them what you really think. They want you to talk them out of bad ideas. They want to put out something that’s great for their customers.

The end user is always your client. If not, you should fire the one that hired you.

Three years after Katrina, the house in this photograph sits right where the flood waters swept it, across the street from where it was built.

We saw several others like it. But more importantly, we saw a huge number of empty lots where homes no longer even exist. Where nothing is being built to replace them. Where the government has left a community for dead.

A tour of the lower 9th ward in New Orleans (NOLA) reveals that thousands of homes were wiped out and have never been replaced. The upper 9th is seeing new development, but the lower 9th sits just as it has for three long years.

After all this time, three of the top five stories on the local news last week were still about the after effects of the storm. One was about a neighborhood that has still not been fixed up, and a long-delayed plan to do anything about it.

But here’s the kicker.

Another story on the news that night was about a temporary relief plan to lower gas prices a bit over the next few months. During the story, a city official revealed that NOLA could most certainly afford the budget hit that would result from the plan. You see, New Orleans has a 1 billion dollar budget surplus.

He almost smirked as he said it. As though it were laughable that anyone would even ask if the city could afford the plan.

A local told us that the only real way to make a difference in NOLA through donations is to donate directly to Habitat for Humanity.

All that other money that’s been donated? Yeah, that didn’t necessarily go to reconstruction. It went into a budget surplus. It may help some people save a little cash on gas for a little while, but it won’t help the 200,000 people who were displaced by Katrina and have never returned. It won’t help the people who got less money from the government as they should have and couldn’t afford to build new houses in the place they used to call home.

The system was probably not designed to fail this badly. But it has. And no one seems to be doing anything to get it back on track.

Tell me something, Mr. City Official. How is it that the NOLA government, working in conjunction with FEMA, can have that much money in your pocket and not one iota of common sense between you?

When systems fail, we need to get them back in order. It doesn’t matter if you’re a government, a non-profit, or a web startup. When your system fails, so do the people who put their trust in you.

If the system continues to fail—if your constituency continues to fail—you’re done. Finito. You’ll never earn that back.

If your job is to help people succeed, you’d be wise to remember to do it.

“I am a child of fire
I am a lion
I have desires
And I was born inside the sun this morning”
— Hanging Tree, by Adam Duritz (Counting Crows)

We all want to feel this way. We want to believe we’re the best at whatever it is we’re doing. We want to feel brilliant. Beautiful. Passionate. Alive. Bigger than alive.

Funny thing. So do our users. And our job is to help them feel that way.

The question isn’t whether or not you should talk to one. The question is, When is the right time?

The answer is right now. Before you get any further along on a major product update without a guiding vision. Before you spend days on end designing high-quality artwork for a muddled concept that won’t fly no matter how nice the aesthetic. Before you announce something important to the world (and it’s all important) without getting an expert opinion. And before you have to spend a whole day explaining your muddled concept to the designer you brought in to clarify it.

Talk to the designer first, before you make a bunch of decisions. It’ll be much easier to talk yourself out of the bad ones if you haven’t spent a lot time convincing yourself they’re good.

(I’m not saying all your ideas will be bad, by the way—just that the bad ones need to be quashed before they do harm, and designers usually are very good quash-ers.)

Virtually every site for every corporation, product, non-profit, or service on the web includes an “About Us” section. And right now, almost all of them are broken. 

Sure, this boilerplate collection of site pages does the simple job of letting visitors know who they’re having a marketing conversation with—who’s inside the company walls, what the organization does, and so on.

But in the “Web 2.0” era, these sections are missing something important:

A list of the organization’s social networking profiles.

If markets are conversations—and you know they are—then our sites need to start pointing to the places where the conversations really take place. Where our biggest fans and worst enemies can talk to a representative of the people listed on “About Us”. Where the “About Us” people can talk back.

JetBlue, Zappos, and others have leapt forward far enough to dedicate real people to man their Twitter updates (as opposed to bots). It’s time to follow suit.

It’s also time to reinvent “About Us”.