3 Things to Avoid When Creating Your Landscape Design Checklist
As a landscaping professional, designing a beautiful landscape is just the start of your work. Your job also includes pitching those designs, managing a team, calculating costs and bidding, and lots, and we mean lots of customer service! With all of these tasks come a lot of juggling paperwork, including your handy landscape design checklist that helps you get inside your client’s mind. And since this part of the process is crucial to the overall project’s success, we compiled a list of what NOT to include in your survey.
Read on, and let’s make sure your landscape design checklist is as clear as can be. Once your new and improved checklist is ready, you can store it and other essential paperwork and designs in a robust bidding and design software that keeps you organized.
Eager to hear about that powerful landscape design software? We’ll do you one even better. You can try out LandOne Takeoff for free and get started streamlining your design process today. Sign up for the free trial here!
The Purpose of Your Landscape Design Checklist
Before we jump straight into what isn’t needed in your checklist, let’s start by going over what a landscape design checklist should do.
A great questionnaire should:
- Help you understand a client’s vision.
- Clarify the client’s personal needs and desired intent of the project.
- Help you create an informed plan for the property.
The checklist won’t be your sole source of information needed for your design process, but it’s most important for allowing your clients to express themselves and their project needs. With that said, your landscape checklist should be comprehensive and digestible, but…
Here’s what you should avoid in your landscape design checklist:
- Using industry jargon.
Whether you send a checklist ahead of your design meeting for the client to fill out, or whether you walk through the checklist with them to complete it, it’s important to use common language, not industry speak.
A good tip is to test out your questionnaire on family and friends to make sure it’s easy to understand.
- Making it extremely long.
Your checklist should not replace longer conversations you’ll have with your client, so keep the questionnaire completion time under 15 minutes.
Ensure that you’re touching on the key points that will help you define a design that meets their needs and fully takes into account the conditions of the job site. At minimum, you should include:
- Client’s contact information
- Family details (pets, outdoor activities/hobbies that would influence landscape design)
- What is the specific reason or project that you’re calling us for?
- What are the conditions of the site? This would include:
- directional facing of the home
- sunny vs. shaded areas
- area measurements
- HOA restrictions
- problem areas
- any existing site surveys or information
- Are there any plants that you have seen that you like?
- Are there any plants that you do not want/like?
- What is your home style?
- What materials (stone, concrete, etc.) do you like and/or work best?
- Is there anything else around the landscape that needs immediate attention?
- What’s your budget?
- What are your maintenance level expectations?
- Asking too many open-ended questions.
Checkboxes are your friend, so use them wisely! Open-ended questions can not only eat up a client’s time, but it could result in you receiving an essay of information that could’ve been answered using a multiple-choice question. This is particularly true when discussing design styles or preferred features of the site.
Ditch the disorganization and simplify your design process
The landscape design checklist is only one piece of the puzzle in your design process, and here at LandOne, we get that.
We designed LandOne Takeoff, a multifunctional digital design tool, to make the entire design process simpler from start to finish. So remove all the guesswork and disorganization and present a polished proposal to your clients with our standout software made for landscaping professionals by landscaping professionals.
Sign up for your free trial with LandOne Takeoff today and try it out for yourself!
