#client-intake

#client-intake

Running a photography business can be incredible fun, offering unique experiences and opportunities to meet diverse people. However, it requires significant dedication and effort, often demanding extra hours beyond a typical workweek.

Curiosity is foundational in the arts, as demonstrated by the Menil Collection's exhibition, which transformed a gallery into an education room through public programs.

Capacity Planning is the process of right-sizing the 'Total Project Demand' with the forecasted Team Capacity. Most UX teams have no idea what their capacity is. Fewer still have a process for calculating it and using it during quarterly planning activities with their counterparts in Product Management & Engineering to ensure teams don't commit to more work than they can handle.

Performance is a critical factor in user engagement, where even minor delays in loading can deter users. A clean and simple user interface also contributes significantly to user retention.

Overlooking how important a brief is will start your collaboration with a web development agency in London off on the wrong foot. A brief not only communicates what you're looking to build, but it also aligns everyone's expectations, mitigates delays and limits the amount of revisions required. Whether it's an e-commerce site launch, a branding overhaul or tweaking a few pain points, the guidance you provide will directly influence your website from day one.

WordPress plays a key role in this strategy. The content management system (CMS) and its ecosystem are vehicles for helping us adapt to what's next. Features like connecting to third-party APIs and implementing artificial intelligence (AI) come to mind. It all adds up to an exciting time to build websites and related applications. However, it's possible to go a little too far with technology - particularly when it comes to customer service.

Most of these companies start the journey from a functional standpoint, avoiding extra layers that may "divert users' attention", such as refined flows, potential edge cases, and, sometimes, proper visual design foundations and user experience. Here, the goal is to ship the product first to validate its value, then address other considerations.

During my eight years working in agile product development, I have watched sprints move quickly while real understanding of user problems lagged. Backlogs fill with paraphrased feedback. Interview notes sit in shared folders collecting dust. Teams make decisions based on partial memories of what users actually said. Even when the code is clean, those habits slow delivery and make it harder to build software that genuinely helps people.

AI is disrupting more than the software industry, and is doing so at a breakneck speed. Not long ago, designers were deep in Figma variables and pixel-perfect mockups. Now, tools like v0, Lovable, and Cursor are enabling instant, vibe-based prototyping that makes old methods feel almost quaint. What's coming into sharper focus isn't fidelity, it's foresight. Part of the work of Product Design today is conceptual: sensing trends, building future-proof systems, and thinking years ahead.

Sam's issue: "After I signed up it made a git repo with no explanation and the only next step it suggested was to connect my domain, after that is done... what do i do?" This classic. No context, no guidance, no next steps. The industry data shows what's at stake: 77% of users abandon apps within 3 days (Source: Andrew Chen, a16z) Top-quartile onboarding achieves 2.5x higher customer lifetime value (Source: McKinsey) Getting users to their "aha moment" quickly is critical for retention

My role was straightforward: write queries (prompts and tasks) that would train AI agents to engage meaningfully with users. But as a UXer, one question immediately stood out - who are these users? Without a clear understanding of who the agent is interacting with, it's nearly impossible to create realistic queries that reflect how people engage with an agent. That's when I discovered a glitch in the task flow.