Sometime last year I started avoiding writing proposals, and lengthy project specifications. I always had a sneaking suspicion that these documents did nothing but kill my own will to live as effectively as they kill trees, but when three clients in a row asked for copies of their signed project specs after the project was finished, I was convinced they were doing nobody any good, even the arses they were supposed to cover.
In fact I’ve always avoided spending much time on these documents, but I started to find some genuinely more useful alternatives. I now open Microsoft word about twice a week and have a better life for it.
The following are a handful of teh tools I've found helpful in this "show, don't tell" way of working.
Axure RP
Since we started using Axure to spell out websites to clients, a few things have happened.
We close more sales. Clients feel so much more comfortable with what they’re going to get that we get to the start of the project far more quickly.
Small projects actually take less time to wireframe with this tool than they do to describe in writing, even our sales team have started to use it for initial discussions instead of inflicting death by PowerPoint on prospective clients.
Gotomeeting.com
Ever had to describe a website by phone? That even sounds like a ridiculous thing to have to do, but even with two people looking at the same site coming to an understanding can be tricky.
Take control of the description, point, highlight, click and be sure the other viewer is following you exactly where you want. You can even hand over control to the other person to help them demonstrate what they’re talking about.
Get Satisfaction
Web projects aren’t just about the build stage, they’re about what happens after launch. In this context, adopting a more open platform for providing customer service can demonstrate exactly what your customers can expect after launch.
Open service isn’t right for every business, we don’t use it for the majority of our products as they are too bespoke and a helpful answer for one client might be detrimental to another, or expose aspects of their business that they themselves don’t want made public. For more commodity products or for hosted services where everyone has the same experience, this is a great way to operate.
The total absence of support requests on our email marketing tool, ShineEmail, speaks volumes.
Camtasia
This is absolutely great for recording demonstrations of software. When we wanted to show how easy ShineEmail is to use, we went straight to this tool to create a live demo of creating, sending and getting reoprts from a new email campiagn in under 8 minutes.
Jing
Camtasia's free little brother. Record short screen clips and post to their screencast.com website or YouTube.
Best for quick and effective "this is what I'm talking about" moments, I showed this to my dad, who managed outsourced bug-testing teams on multi-million pound developments in the 90's and he reckoned just one clip could have saved them days in misunderstandings and wasted effort.
I hope the above tips and tools can make your work more effective and enjoyable too. I'd love to hear if you have any of your own to share?