Building Confidence: How to Guide Clients to Success

Design can be confusing — so our process begins before the beginning

As far as we at Zajno are concerned, there are no bad customers. OK — there probably are one or two out there somewhere. But in our lifetime so far, we’re happy to say that everyone who’s approached us about helping them fulfill their digital ambitions has done so in good faith and with honest goals.

But the fact is that the process of creating digital products is complex, and for anyone who is unfamiliar with that process, it can be pretty daunting. Accordingly, when new prospective clients approach us, they oftentimes feel nervous about what lies ahead — and that nervousness may present itself in the form of some challenging behaviors. These can include:

• Reluctance to consider new or unorthodox ideas; a fear of standing out
• Problems understanding the stages of the design process
• Difficulty putting feedback into a positive, actionable form

Now, if these commonplace phenomena are not properly handled, they can fuse together to create a more general roadblock to achieving a successful outcome. Most scarily, this can come in one of the two following forms:

• Breakdown in trust
• Loss of direction

Before we go in

To deal with this problem in a really fundamental way, we have to get a little conceptual and ask: “where does the design process begin?”

The simple answer might be that the process starts with a list of requirements from the client that the agency must fulfill: to create “an outstanding, appealing and interactive website” or “a highly-optimized mobile app with geolocation and chat capabilities,” perhaps.

But we think that’s the wrong answer. Instead, for us, design begins with anticipating the arrival of each new client, and considering how we will guide them through the very first stages of thinking about what they want to create.

Fresh thinking doesn’t mean everything we do is avant-garde. The first major step of our contact with a new client is usually as traditional as it comes: a call. But within that call, a carefully-planned process plays out — and sets in motion a chain of events that both moves us towards an understanding of the client, and moves the client towards a fuller and more structured grasp of the route towards the product they want to create.

The building blocks of success

The precise order in which the process takes place varies on a case-by-case basis — but what doesn’t change is the overall ground we ensure is covered as we make our acquaintance with each new client. That ground can be divided into the following areas:

Creating conditions of trust

We think that before you can build a business-to-business relationship, you must first create a human-to-human one. That means understanding the deeper motivations of your client — not just their immediate business goals.

There’s really no formula here, but we think that by opening up, putting ourselves out there, and even exposing our vulnerabilities, we can encourage new clients to do just the same. And when a group of people share in a process like this, it’s very hard for a sense of trust not to begin to emerge.

Learning to love new ideas

The internet is full of websites and apps that look pretty much the same as each other. We can’t really blame anyone for this: in a world full of risk, it’s understandable that people so often try to play things safe. The problem is that by playing things safe, you expose yourself to the biggest danger of all: the danger of forgettability.

People often believe that on this front, they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place: either go with the flow, risking mundanity, or make a desperate bid to be original — and take the chance of looking a fool. We advocate neither of these: instead, we help clients to understand that by carefully analyzing what’s already out there, it’s possible to take an evidence-based approach to doing things differently — and better.

The likes of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are often seen as genius mavericks, but they are/were also incredibly precise and fastidious analysts. For us too, it has been by combining precision with courage that we have built the successful track record we can now boast.

Understanding how design works

As designers, we’re always amazed to see that some of our colleagues in the industry think it’s their clients’ responsibility to understand how their working process operates. Well, that’s not us.

Our clients come from a rich variety of different sectors, from finance to horticulture, music to artificial intelligence and telecommunications. They are experts in their own fields — but there is no reason to expect them to be experts in how design works.

Rather, it’s our responsibility to help them understand the complex nature of the processes they’re becoming involved with. This is always challenging but constantly educational for us because the apotheosis of good design is understanding how non-designers will experience what we do. Helping our clients to understand the design process is an absolutely key part of that.

Mapping the route forward

Because we often work with young companies, and because even established firms are now evolving faster than ever, the nature of the product we’re building can often change over the course of its creation. Indeed, because we help our clients to think about their businesses in ways they may not have done before, it’s even possible that their business itself might change in the course of our work.

This can be disconcerting for people and organizations that thought they had everything planned out — but our job is to anticipate these changes in perspective at the earliest possible moment, and to help our clients navigate them in a calm, rational way.

Making feedback constructive

When you’re paying money to have something created, and what begins to appear before your eyes differs somehow from what you expected to see, it’s 100% understandable that you might become a touch agitated. This is the moment at which calm and efficient communication between client and design team is at its most important — because it’s the moment at which we need to steer the ship back on course.

And so, we created a manual to help clients construct their feedback in the most constructive and productive way. It helps them tell us what needs to change in a way that will make it possible to action those changes effectively. It helps them create feedback that is descriptive — explaining what is wrong and why — rather than being prescriptive.

Moving forward together

The process I’ve sketched above is a work in progress — and we’re very happy, and even proud, to be open about that. We live in a fast-changing world — and at Zajno we embrace change, and enjoy constantly adapting to it. We don’t think life would be easier if things stood still — we think it would be intolerably boring.

The design process is a vast, complex behemoth — and we’re constantly humbled and exhilarated to count ourselves among its ambassadors. We also take that responsibility very seriously. I’ve written this article with the aim of explaining something about the processes we use in our work — but I’m really happy to report that the act of writing it has also helped me develop my own understanding of those processes. Thanks a lot for reading!

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