What 25 Years of Design Projects Taught Us About What Clients Actually Need

That moment changed the way we ask questions at the start of a project.

Twenty-five years in, the work has touched organizations of every kind: enterprise software companies, healthcare networks, universities, nonprofits, financial institutions, consumer brands. The industries change. The briefs evolve. But the patterns underneath them are remarkably consistent. What clients say they need and what they actually need often aren't the same thing, and learning to hear the difference is most of the job.

This isn't a critique of clients. It's an observation about the nature of the work itself. Design is hard to articulate before it exists, and organizations generally come to us in the middle of something: a rebrand, a digital overhaul, a new product launch, a period of pressure. The brief reflects where they are, not always where they need to go. Part of what we've learned to do is help them see farther forward than the immediate ask.

They Ask for Visual. They Need Clarity.

The single most common request we receive, stated in different ways across different industries, is a variation of "make it look better." And usually, the visual dimension of the problem is real. Sites are dated. Collateral feels inconsistent. The brand doesn't read as well as the organization deserves.

But when we follow that thread, what's almost always underneath it isn't an aesthetic problem. It's a clarity problem. The organization can't explain itself quickly and confidently to the right audience. The messaging is trying to serve too many users. The navigation reflects how the company is organized internally, not how a visitor is actually trying to find something.

Fixing the visual without fixing the underlying structure produces polished confusion. We've seen it enough times to know: a redesign that doesn't also address information architecture, messaging hierarchy, and user experience fundamentals is going to underperform no matter how good it looks.

The better version of "make it look better" is "help people understand who we are and what to do next." That's the brief we try to arrive at, together.

They Ask for More Features. They Need a Reason to Simplify.

Feature requests arrive in waves. A stakeholder has seen something on a competitor's site and wants it. A team needs a new section to house content they've been producing. A capability exists in the platform, and no one has built it yet, so it feels like an opportunity.

What we've learned to do is slow down before we build. Not because new functionality is wrong, but because complexity compounds quietly. Each feature makes sense individually. Together, they can make an experience heavy, confusing, and hard to navigate, especially for someone arriving without context or patience to spare.

The web design decisions that matter most are often subtractive. What doesn't need to be there? What could be removed without anyone missing it? What is the site asking of visitors before it gives them anything? Those questions tend to create more value than any additional feature.

One of the more productive conversations we have with clients is about the difference between organizational completeness and user-facing clarity. The organization may need to document everything. Visitors need to find the two or three things that matter to them. Designing for both at once is where many sites lose coherence.

They Ask for a Rebrand. They Need a Decision About Who They're For.

Brand projects often start with a visual brief: the logo feels dated, the color palette isn't flexible enough, and the typography doesn't hold up across digital and print. Those observations are usually accurate. But the harder conversation, the one that determines whether the rebrand actually works, is about the audience.

Organizations frequently outgrow their positioning without realizing it. The brand was built for a market that has shifted. The messaging was written for a customer profile that no longer dominates the base. The visual identity is sending signals that don't match what the business has become.

A strong brand identity isn't primarily about aesthetics. It's about legibility: being unmistakably clear about who you are, who you serve, and why it matters. When that clarity exists, the visual work becomes much more tractable. When it doesn't, no amount of design refinement produces a brand that feels fully resolved.

The rebrands we're proudest of weren't the ones where we introduced the most dramatic visual change. They were the ones where the organization used the process to make a real decision about its positioning, and the design gave that decision a form people could immediately understand.

They Ask for a Process. They Need Trust.

A consistent request, especially from organizations that have been burned before, is for a process that is clear, structured, and predictable. Milestones. Deliverables. Sign off at each stage. These things matter, and we take them seriously.

But what clients are usually trying to solve through the process is a trust problem. They've worked with agencies that disappeared mid-project, delivered something unexpected at the end, couldn't explain their decisions, or failed to account for how the work would actually be implemented. The process they're asking for is really a request for a relationship in which they feel confident and informed.

What builds that trust isn't primarily the process. It's the quality of the questions asked at the start, the willingness to surface difficult observations during discovery, and the consistency between what's promised and what's delivered. Credibility in any service relationship is accumulated through exactly those interactions: the ones where we showed up with honesty and care, not just deliverables.

We've also learned that clients want to be challenged, not just served. The most productive relationships are ones in which we push back thoughtfully on briefs that don't serve the audience, flag risks before they become problems, and tell organizations what we're seeing, not only what they want to hear.

They Ask for a Design System. They Need One That Survives Contact with Reality.

Design systems have become central to how organizations build and maintain digital products at scale. The appetite for them has grown steadily over the years, and for good reason. Consistency is valuable. Governance matters. Component libraries reduce duplication and help distributed teams work more coherently.

But we've seen enough systems fail to know that the deliverable and the outcome aren't the same thing. A design system that doesn't account for how the organization actually operates, who maintains it, how decisions get made, and what happens when someone goes off-script, will drift from the moment it's published.

The most common failure mode isn't technical. It's adoption. Systems get ignored when they're harder to use than building from scratch, when they're not kept current, or when no one owns them after the agency leaves the engagement. The elements that keep a design system alive aren't in the component library. They're in the governance structure, the maintenance cadence, and the organizational will to treat the system as a living thing rather than a finished document.

What clients actually need from a design system is usually less comprehensive than what they ask for and more durable than what they'd build without guidance. Fewer components, documented more clearly, owned more explicitly, with a realistic maintenance path.

They Ask for Accessibility. They Often Mean Compliance.

Accessibility comes up in most briefs now, which is progress. But the framing is often backward. The ask is typically about avoiding legal risk or hitting a standard, not about building something that works well for people who navigate differently.

Those goals aren't opposed to each other, but they lead to different places. Compliance is a floor. Actual web accessibility as a design practice goes further: it's about ensuring the experience holds up for people using screen readers, keyboard navigation, low-vision settings, and any number of assistive technologies. It's also about writing clearly, structuring content logically, and not making anyone feel like they're fighting the interface to get what they need.

In our experience, accessibility-minded design improves the experience for everyone. The constraints it introduces, cleaner hierarchy, better contrast, and more deliberate navigation usually make the work stronger overall. Treating it as a separate track to be bolted on at the end produces weaker results at a higher cost.

What Stays Constant

Twenty-five years of client work have taught us that the needs underlying the briefs tend to be more consistent than the briefs themselves. Organizations want to be understood. They want to communicate with confidence. They want their digital presence to reflect who they actually are, not who they were three years ago. They want to trust that the people they've hired are paying attention.

What changes is how those needs are expressed, what the technology allows, and what the competitive context demands. A brand built on visual and verbal consistency will earn recognition over time. An experience built around how visitors actually navigate, rather than how the org chart is structured, will convert and retain more effectively. A design system maintained like a living product will outlast one published and forgotten.

None of this is complicated in principle. In practice, it requires someone in the room asking the questions that don't always come up in a typical brief: What do your users hesitate over? What does this interface ask of someone who doesn't already know the backstory? What would you remove if you could only keep what mattered?

Those questions are where the real work begins.

About the Author

Erin Lentz

Erin Lentz is Executive Director of Design at ArtVersion, where she leads experience design initiatives focused on clarity, accessibility, and thoughtful digital systems.

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