I've dealt with a micromanager before. As my employer.

One that, during the building of his home, also had contractors walk away because of his micro-managing the build on-site :')

It's some level of control-freakishness (that's a word) to think you need that level of involvement in every aspect of your life...

I'm sorry, but this is a surefire way of building shitty products. While I agree allowing a client to micro-manage everything you do would not be productive, so is designing in a black box.

I don't think I'd ever say the words "design happens in a black box". That's just... wrong.

You seem to be arguing one extreme over another. There is a balance to this that results in good work and ultimately great products for your clients and their customers.

Literally every one of those hypothetical quotes you listed is something you can easily push-back on or give an answer that I think any reasonable person would understand.

"I thought you said this was a mobile-first design?"

"Well, we're starting with desktop and working our way down through the breakpoints. This is how we typically do things and it's worked well on our other engagements."

If they are still not convinced, show them a previous successful project where you did exactly this.

If they are still not convinced, you should fire the client and stop working with unreasonable people. Maybe I am extremely lucky and have only dealt with very few truly unreasonable people in my 13+ years doing this, but that doesn't seem to be the norm.

I'd argue further than you should educate your clients, especially if the project is substantial in scope. If I'm going to be working with someone for a month or more, I most definitely want them to understand and be fully bought into the design process. They hired me for this reason, not just because the pixels are pretty (usually). Even on small projects I talk about and go into the importance of various aspects of the design process and why we do certain things the way we do. We often use previous projects, which they have often hired us because they really liked, as examples of why sticking to this process (though exceptions can always be made for good reasons) is good.

The best clients feel like partners and this is often because they are bought into and appreciate your process, even if they don't fully understand it or have the experience to trust it.

It's your job as a designer to build this trust and understand that clients are paying you a lot of money to help them solve problems. This doesn't mean you have to do what they say, but it does mean you need to try and make them understand. It is client services after-all.

My last point, and I'm sorry this is a wall of text, is that design absolutely cannot happen in a black box. Sure, you might end up with something pretty and the client might think it's great. But does it actually solve the problems they need it to? How do you know? What assumptions did you base it on? Did you validate any of them? Did you dig into the problem? Did you iterate, get feedback, and iterate some more? Did you speak to any of their customers?

Often clients are building something that they actually do know a lot about. They can be their own customer in that regard and will be a great source of knowledge. Even if this isn't the case, they will usually have spoken to many of their customers, which you should do as well. Ignoring this and going off to do your thing with zero input is only going to create more work for you later and cost the client more money.

This isn't even addressing the fact that you might simply have designed the wrong thing, their expectations were for something totally different, and you just wasted weeks of work and now you have a frustrated client on your hands.

So yeah, no. I really dislike hearing this attitude, especially when younger designers might be reading it and thinking it's a normal way to approach design and client work. I can't count how many I've had to essentially un-brainwash to get out of this mindset.

Design can certainly happen in a black box, but it's not going to be good.

This is basically a surefire way of turning a great client into a terrible micromanager.

Andrew,

One of the responsibilities of a consulting designer is to educate his clients on the design process. If you do a great job on that — the chances that client is going to micromanage you are low. In the case when your client is well-educated in the design field, but still micromanages you — it is a trust issue. You might try to solve that in various ways, and full transparency might become your good ally.

Darren, this is how I work too. (Might also share when stuck on something / looking for early feedback / want to check in with team)