How we work with clients who don't know what they want (yet)

The phrase that comes up most in first meetings is “something modern, that looks professional.” It’s real information, but it isn’t a brief. And that’s fine — it’s our job to turn that into something buildable.

What we almost always do is ask for references of sites the client likes and, even more important, of sites they don’t like and why. The “why not” part gives away far more information than the “yes, I like this” part, because people are usually better at pointing out specific flaws than articulating what they want in positive terms.

Some clients arrive with very clear ideas and end up changing their mind halfway through the project, and some clients arrive with nothing clear and are the easiest to convince once they see something tangible. A sketch is worth more than half an hour explaining abstract concepts, so we try to show something visual as early as possible, even if it’s ugly, instead of stretching out the “definition” phase with meetings.

With a food client, for example, they had no idea what they needed technically (nor did they need to, that part is ours), but they were absolutely clear that the product photos had to be the first thing seen, with no banners or filler text on top. That single sentence defined half the homepage structure.

What doesn’t work, we’ve tried it, is handing over a twenty-page document with the proposal before the client has seen anything visual. They get lost in details that don’t matter to them and don’t discuss what actually matters, because they have nothing to compare it against yet.

In the end, “not knowing what you want” is almost never literal. It’s more that what they want is described in a different language than ours, and half the work of the first meeting is translating business anxiety (“I need to sell more”) into concrete design and content decisions.