A studio offers two revision rounds. The client sends feedback on a Tuesday, more on Thursday, and something from a colleague the following week.
None of these are rounds in the studio's sense and all of them are work. By the time the design is approved, six sets of changes have been made and the two included rounds were consumed by the first two days.
The studio absorbs it because raising it felt petty each time. The project loses money through a definition nobody wrote down.
1. Define what a round actually is
Consolidated feedback, from one person, on one version, within a stated period. Without this definition a round is whatever the client sends next.
2. Require one consolidated set of feedback
Not a stream of messages. Asking for everything in one document is reasonable, and it produces better feedback as well as fewer rounds.
3. Name one approver at the client
A design approved by a committee generates conflicting instructions. One person with authority, gathering internal views, is the arrangement that works.
4. Set a feedback deadline per round
With a consequence for the timeline. Projects stall in client review far more often than in studio production.
5. Define revisions at the right stages
Concept, design and build have different revision economics. A change at concept is cheap and the same change after build is expensive, and clients do not know that.
6. Explain the cost of late changes
Not as a threat but as information. Clients make better decisions when they understand that approving a direction and then reversing it costs real work.
7. Distinguish a revision from a change of scope
A different colour is a revision. An additional page, a new feature or a different structure is scope, and conflating the two is where projects lose money.
8. Put the change request process in the proposal
Named, with a rate and a process. Agreed in advance, invoking it is routine. Introduced mid project, it feels like a penalty.
9. Log every change request
Even the ones you absorb. A client who can see a list of what was added understands the position, and an unrecorded overrun looks like poor estimating.
10. Charge for some of them
Not all, and enough that the process is real. A change process that is never invoked teaches clients that it does not exist.
11. Ask for feedback in the right form
Specific, on the thing itself, rather than general impressions. Studios that guide feedback get fewer rounds and better outcomes.
12. Set the expectation before the first design is shown
The number of rounds, what happens after them and how to give feedback. Said before the first design, this is process. Said afterwards, it is defensive.
13. Keep it connected to the original scope
An unscoped project cannot have bounded revisions, which is the groundwork in scope and revision questions before a website project.
14. Establish the process at the enquiry stage
An assistant that explains how revisions work, what a round means, who should approve and how additional changes are handled sets the expectation before a proposal is even written. The brief problem sits in website quote requests without a brief, and the kind of functionality clients request late appears in catering and takeaway enquiries from your website and is it in stock the question retail websites fumble. See pricing, run the numbers on the chatbot ROI calculator, and the sector view sits under web designers.