After almost a decade of writing proposals for user experience design I have come to one conclusion- line item pricing or fixed fee. This conclusion addresses all of the issues surrounding negotiating and the management of risk for the partner and the client. So what is the conclusion?

Prospective clients have a need to get the best value for their dollar. And partners have a need to deliver the best value while still making a profit. To that end, during the negotiation stage all types of project activities get put on the chopping block in an effort to decrease scope in order to decrease cost.

See user experience design involves a big investment in research. So the amount of hours times hourly rate can seem high at first. But a good research activity in the beginning of the project will feed the other major deliverables down the line such as information architecture and wireframing. Not to mention provide a good basis for the design brief. Best of all it allows for less churn throughout the duration of the project because one can always fall back to the research.

Unfortunately if you broke out research and put it in as a line item in your proposal it is typically the first thing that makes it to the chopping block. Most prospective clients don’t realize that removing the research means that they are asking you to simply be creative hands- not creative thinkers. This is a big issue because the client effectively removed the user experience portion of the work- at least a major chunk of it.

In addition to the initial research portion, usability testing is typically next. This is largely due to the client not understanding the value of testing. To them it is just a big draw on their budget.

But l propose, and conclude based upon my many years of watching prospective clients negotiate our fees that fixed fee is the way to go. In that structure we will perform research, conduct testing, and provide a great looking, easy to use web site or web app. See that way they are unable to pull the pieces apart. Now we can negotiate on the bottom line price but not the process. After all, the process insures a predictable outcome.

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