How to Teach Your Clients

You can’t give someone a car, without giving them the keys as well.

Every year across America, thousands of sixteen year old drivers climb off of their bike and into the driver’s seat of their very own car. For many parents, this is a scary period of time. Roads can be a dangerous proposition, especially if you live in crowded metro areas like Boston, LA, San Jose, or San Diego. The best a parent can do is prepare their child for the road ahead. That’s why they give them driver’s education, provide on the road instruction by a licensed professional, and spend dozens of hours in the passenger seat, hanging on for dear life as their teenager learns the ropes.

The best we can do, is prepare our clients.

There are a lot of design firms that do good work. There are not a lot of firms that give their clients keys to the kingdom, and teach them how to use it. This is an issue. Clients don’t have unlimited time to learn the ropes of the products your design them, and you don’t have the time to sit down with every client, for every product. What can you do to make the handoff process easier?

Here are a few of our principles. See if they work for you. 

1. We base every product on the principle of simplicity. If it’s too complicated for a client to use it, we start over.
2. We offer turnkey designs, so every client can use it without worry about the backend.
3. Automation is highly valued. If we can automate a process for our clients, they spend more time with their people.
4. We work with our clients over 3 rounds of edits. Some take less; some more. But the process lends to ownership, and everyone wants that.
5. We sit down with every client and go over each product’s use, as well as provide automated helps that supplement our teaching.

Everyone wins when the car is on the road and the driver knows how to drive. 

If you are a designer, what are you doing to make sure your clients are fully prepared to lead with the product you developed with them? If you are a client, how has your design firm prepared you to lead well with your new in hand product? If we can help either of you, let us know.