Hi, nice to meet you: First meeting with a client

Meeting your first client is an interesting experience. It’s exciting, the nervousness and anticipation, what is the project you’re going to be working on, what sort of experience will you design for? Even further, what sort of UX methods will you get to use to address the problem?

Our client is starting a trip planning company for families who want to experience destinations in a genuine and authentic way. Their trip planners, or scouts, create customized itineraries for families that take into account all family members. She challenged us to create the site of the website used by scouts to create itineraries and manage their guidebook of activities and performance statistics. My team determined that three key interactions she wanted us to focus on were the trip builder, creating a new activity, and the dashboard itself. A lot of the visual elements such as logos, fonts, and colors had already been chosen and put together in a style guide she gave us. One noteworthy request she had made was that our work be actionable so that once we had completed our project their developer could begin immediately executing our designs.

All in all, our first meeting went really well. It was great having a client who had some background knowledge of UX and had a solid idea of what they needed to achieve their objectives. The fact that they already had a strong brand identity allowed us to focus on the information architecture and interaction design and accomplish more during the past two weeks than would have been otherwise possible.