Why Client Questionnaires Suck

I have decided that I dislike client questionnaires very much.  For the purpose of designing a landscape of any sort, they fall far short of useful.  I am sure someone somewhere found a client who enjoyed filling out forms, but I have yet to meet any prospective landscape project or client who responded well to (or was well-served by) a written questionnaire.

Here’s how it often goes:  The service oriented company or design firm spends hours dreaming up questions that will help them in their design process.  They plan and scheme and write down as many questions as they can.   The questions are relevant, the information asked for is important, but this approach leaves a LOT to be desired and does neither the designer nor the client any favors.

This questionnaire may include questions like (in no particular order):

• What types of activities do you envision in your garden?
• How many children do you have?  pets?  types and ages?
• Do you have any favorite plants or colors?
• Where did you / your spouse grow up?  Do you have any favorite childhood memories of gardens?
• Who will be performing the maintenance on the garden?

The more short-sighted firms send this out in a packet with a contract for the client to sign.  It is a standard form – the creative equivalent of those lists of symptoms that we all have to deal with at every doctor’s visit.  Do you have any pain?  blurry vision?  vomiting? Please check all that apply, thank you so much.

I would expect that every landscape project (and this is my personal approach) would be better served if their designer were observant and took the time to not only visit the project site and talk to the client in person, but also took careful notes.  Listening, observing, and interacting with a client ALWAYS tells us more about both the project, the client, and the direction of our work than any questionnaire ever will.  Intuition plays a significant role when employed by skilled designers.

If you simply google “client questionnaire landscape” you’ll even come up with a number of Landscape Contractor websites, Landscape Architecture firms, and Landscape Designer websites that feature or at least mention their questionnaires.  They assert that this is an effective way of producing a design for you, the client, that is customized to your needs.  Baloney.  This way, you, the client, can download a static form and fill it out.  What fun.  How engaging!  So inspiring.  I am sure you feel special already, right?

Don’t get me wrong here – many of these questions need to be considered (see my previous post “Client Homework”).  However, written questionnaires do a dis-service to the client, site, and creative process.  They cannot replace gut-feelings and aesthetic impressions.  To use one (in my humble opinion) is to insult the client, minimizing the value of their input, while exposing a lack of intuition and focus on the part of the designer.

There is no way any set of questions will allow me to distinguish client aesthetics better than an in-person visit on-site.  If the project site is different than the initial meeting site (i.e. another home or office), both are important.  I want to know if this is a client with doilies on the furniture or modern art on the walls.  Does the client have a strong emotional attachment to the project, or are they more detached?  Whether I am visiting with a single individual or a committee, I need the benefit of the input and reactions of everyone during those important first meetings.

I once had the honor of meeting a couple who were developing 8700 acres of property into a master-planned community and resort.  We met on their future home site to decide the placement of their new home on the parcel that they were planning to keep.  The wife expressed her views to my boss and I during a 2-hour site visit.  The husband was more the strong and silent type – for most of the meeting, he stayed with us while we hiked the hills of the site waving our arms and talking about views.  However,  during one of his wife’s assertions about their future home, the husband quietly turned away and wandered a few paces off.  I could see that he did not agree with what she had said, but would not say so in the company of others (or at all?).

In the end, the approach to the client / landscape designer relationship that makes a project sing and builds good working relationships is a straight-forward chat.  Reviewing the very landscape issues (that could have been addressed in a lousy questionnaire) in a face-to-face meeting goes much farther to producing a successful design than anything else conceivable.