We at Usersnap teamed up with Assembla to survey nearly 1.000 agencies, development & design companies throughout the world and across industries. We uncovered how client collaboration in web development has changed over the years, and how it needs to change.
The State of Client Collaboration in Development & Design Survey Report explores the field of client work and how collaboration is evolving.
52% of web development & design companies see client communication as the main challenge they are currently facing.
And yet 41% of those companies still choose email as their main method of client communication.
Well, I guess it’s time to address these challenges and to look for an alternative, more productive way of communication.
You can download the full survey as a PDF here. We decided not to ask for your email address in exchange. So download the full survey results 100% worry-free.
It would be super nice of you if you could give us some sharing love. If you enjoyed the survey, tweet about it here. Or share it on Linkedin or Facebook.
If you don’t have time to download the full survey, make sure to check out our summary of the survey results.
In total 931 people participated in this survey on the state of client collaboration in development & design. Those participants are mainly working in web app development (62%), website design & development (54%).
In the recent years, development and design trends have been changing radically. With new tools available, teams are no longer limited by geography.
Instead, web design & development companies can hire people, regardless of where they are located. The web development industry has become a global village.
And for clients, this means that you can partner with design & development companies based on criteria which are more important than location.
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We asked a lot of questions on how web development companies work and which workflows, tools and methodologies they follow.
With agile and scrum being the leading methodologies, the traditional Waterfall only ranked 4th on the list. There is a clear trend towards lean approaches.
| Answer Choices | Responses |
|---|---|
| Waterfall | 165 |
| Agile | 485 |
| Feature-driven development | 230 |
| Lean development | 114 |
| Scrum | 306 |
| Kanban | 125 |
| other | 49 |
To put it simple: Email is still the number 1 tool when it comes to the preferred method of communicating with clients.
While tools like Slack aim to become the killer for internal email, it seems that email will remain the main tool for client communication. However, there’s a clear sign that tools like Skype, Google Doc and other project management tools become more and more important.
| preferred method of communication | |
|---|---|
| Microsoft Excel | |
| Microsoft Project | |
| Google Docs & Google Sheets | |
| Assembla | |
| Atlassian/JIRA | |
| GitHub | |
| Asana | |
| Basecamp | |
| Trello | |
| Pivotal Tracker | |
| Slack | |
| HipChat | |
| Skype | |
| Usersnap | |
| Redmine | |
| others |
| preferred method | responses |
|---|---|
| Phone | 58 |
| Skype | 142 |
| 309 | |
| Project management tool | 82 |
| Face-to-face meetings | 119 |
| others | 36 |
We’ve all been there. And now we know that we’re not alone.
Scope creep (56,6%) and unclear client communication (52,3%) causes the biggest frustration among developers and designers.
| Answer Choices | Responses |
|---|---|
| Work is disorganized | 182 |
| Too much work / work that is not billable | 179 |
| Time management issues | 189 |
| HR and internal team issues | 90 |
| Client communication is unclear | 337 |
| Tracking project status is hard or time-consuming | 137 |
| Available tools lack needed fuctionality | 81 |
| Projects take longer than expected | 292 |
| Scope creep and changed priorities | 365 |
| Too many disparate systems and tools | 169 |
| Other | 39 |
There are a lot more super-interesting findings on how designers and developers collaborate with external clients.
You can download the full survey as a PDF here.
It would be super nice if you could give us some sharing love. So, if you enjoyed the survey, tweet about it here. Or share in on Linkedin or Facebook.
If you don’t have time to download the full survey, make sure to check out our summary of survey results.
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