Why this Agency starts in Adobe Xd (interview)

one of the big points that i make with my channel is that you should always design your website first in a design tool before you start going into elementor because it allows you to make important decisions upfront one of the main videos about this topic went viral and this caused a lot of discussion not everybody agreed with me so that means that the conversation isn't over yet that's why today i am outside here in the city of rotterdam in the netherlands to go to a very cool product design agency to ask them this exact same question i know the owners of the agency personally because i graduated from design school with them in the same year so let's find out if they agree with me should you really design every website first in a design tool is it also relevant for smaller projects where there is not a lot of budget can designing a website actually help you to get better clients or does it slow down your whole process let's go inside and find out oh and by the way if you're new here my name is reno and i run this channel called living with pixels where i try to help people start and build their web design business today i am talking with jasper jasper is the co-owner of the agency named struxxot jasper and bart started this agency a few years ago and they told me that their goal was to make beautiful products while helping their clients get closer to their goals they take this very seriously and that's why i think that they were able to build a business like this because if you give your clients what they want they will give you what you want this is their office but today it's almost empty because of the pandemic their team which is already eight people strong mostly work from home right now and do their meetings via zoom so now that you know a little bit about their business and their vision let's interview the owner jasper and pick his brain on how they handle the design process okay so hey osprey thanks for coming to the show uh you guys have a lot of experience with the design process so my first question is do you always make a design first before you start building with every project yes yes we do and the reason for that is that when you start developing uh straight away and often you miss the target of the client you don't really know what he needs what he wants and then you deliver it and it's not good enough for the client so you have to start over and that costs a lot of money it costs a lot of money indeed yeah and a lot of time actually for you guys and frustration maybe also yeah and often there is no time and there's no budget that's a real problem yeah okay so um what you're actually saying that the main point why you make a design first is because you at the beginning you don't know what the client wants exactly and let's say that you do know what the client wants and you start building directly um yes still we start with the design uh still because um in a design is is much more quicker to show something to a client get feedback on it yeah um and get this response and get uh do changes if needed yeah so so making changes in a design tool you say is much faster than when the website is developed already yes yes indeed and it has to do with technical things right yeah so uh of course when you're just designing it's just what you see and there's not no technical function behind it yet yeah so it's much more easy uh to show it to client what direction we're going and he can know what his opinion is about the solution we're proposing yeah and if he's not okay with it yeah then we can come up with a different solution very easy okay and then i'm gonna make it even harder uh is it even important with like very simple website like a simple static website with five pages i know you guys do much bigger project but let's say that you have maybe a client just needs uh a landing space for a campaign that they do you all you also do the design first right even then okay has that a lot to do with the technical perspective and the speed or is there more there's always more of course even in the design phase there's a lot to win if we do with more sketching or more brainstorming with the clients so it's also more valuable for the client if we uh we design first instead of building first okay can you explain that a little bit more why it's more valuable to the client it's way more time efficient for both the client and for our team okay and the the reason for that is the feedback loops so we often get a lot of feedback during the process and we often want more feedback uh on the early stage so when we do the design first because then it's very easy to shift pixels change the solutions a little bit okay and if you get a lot of feedback uh in the late phase of the project where you start building things then it's a lot harder to do those changes okay so that's actually the the main point that you're saying like yes the page builders are easy to to customize but it's never as fast as changing an element or changing a menu in a design tool indeed and clients can be very demanding and often they can't really express what they need so if you can show it to them in the design tool first yeah that's often helpful for them as well you can do it and also show different versions of the design yeah sometimes yeah so that's also very easy to do you can just duplicate your artboards and show different versions really fast just change the color a little bit change the position of things a little bit and show them next to each other yeah i think that's also a great point which i oftentimes make on my youtube channel is that it's also not only for your client but also for yourself nice to see the different versions next to each other and if you're working in wordpress you're actually saving the new version and the old version disappears yeah definitely sometimes you make changes and you uh you regret it and you want to go back to the previous version or you want to compare it what you did i once had a client i made 10 versions of the homepage and they actually wanted version 2. in the end yeah so that's a time consuming process i can imagine okay so let's say that i see the value in creating a visual design first how do you even come up with a good design often there are multiple steps before the design phase even to really do that well the first step is when a client reach out to you or you reach out to a client because often they have a question or they have a specific brief or a specific id in mind what they want for their new website and then it's very important to to really understand why is this client needed needing this and what is the context and what are other different challenges that we need to solve as a creative team yeah so that already gives you input for the actual visual design yes indeed yeah okay and then what do you do when you know what the client wants uh when we know what the client wants then we start sketching so we're not really diving into a design tool straight away uh it's more likely you want to do little experiments first uh to see what works best for his case so sometimes you actually put in effort before you even have an agreement about a budget yeah sometimes that's necessary uh sometimes the the idea of client is fake or you don't really know the requirements are we don't know how to solve that challenge best so then you do some creative work first you do some sketches or some experiments with the design to trigger the the client's mind um oh to actually convince them yeah or sometimes sometimes the client sees it in a different light and then he suddenly comes up with a lot more requirements needed for his project and then you can really scope the the project and come up with a quotation for him okay so so it actually takes sometimes it takes a lot of effort to convince a client and of course this is more relevant with bigger projects but you're actually also saying that even with smaller projects if the client doesn't really know what they want sketching before you even have talked about money it's important to make them understand what they want but also to convince them yeah exactly and it's very important i think to get that mind of the client and your mind on one page early in the process yeah because then um yeah you have less time uh wasted uh on creating stuff for a client uh what what he doesn't want in the end or a need because a need indeed yeah because with the whole development process it's actually the same argument as with why you create a visual design first because you don't want to waste his money right because if you build a product that he doesn't really need he actually wastes his money exactly you guys wasted your time because you also want to create products that are good for the market right exactly and that's why we do those steps before to reduce time in the later process are you actually going so far that you're saying that if you don't design a website first i know this is a little bit of an edgy question but if you don't design a website first you actually don't really care about your clients that's a bold thing to say okay but yes you can put it that way yeah i think well i think you can give the client much more value for his money if you do design uh phase first so it's more valuable for you and for the client yes indeed yeah all right so good business it's good business okay okay so i have another question and that is that i learned in design school that the design process is actually much bigger than just visual design and development do you agree with me when i say that the design process starts from the moment the first phone call comes in or the first email comes in like how do you see the design process so often when the first phone call occurs yeah you already start diving into the research phase so to speak yeah so you really want to dive into the client business case to see what he wants what he needs to get everything on the table and often we do a follow-up meeting then to okay get even more in-depth information sometimes we also want to talk to his customers his clients oh his target audience so we get a better understanding of okay for who is this website yeah and even then if you have all the insights sometimes we don't start with the visual design straight away okay we do first do some sketching or wireframing okay um and that's all part of the process that's all part of the process yeah yes all right so you're actually saying like the design process is not just visual design and development it starts from the moment you do research and that already can be asking the client what he wants or looking at his website for example exactly yeah yeah it's an important step in the process really okay that's nice to know okay but isn't this a lot of risk uh if you don't know if the client actually wants to work with you yes yes sometimes it is but um we are willing to take that risk because often for on our side is also evaluation of the client okay so do we really have the resources to help this client and we can only know that if we start asking those questions resources or is it also do you want to work with this client sometimes that's also the case because i can imagine that you don't build a business like this with clients that that only have a 500 budget no so often uh the first conversations you have with a client you can really feel like okay what is the budget what are the requirements sometimes you um you see that that you're not the right party for the client to work with so now you're honest about it yeah let me honest sometimes they need a whole set of different services that we don't provide for example marketing strategy and then we refer them to partners of ours okay so it's not actually a good goal to get as many clients as you want it's a better goal to just work with the clients you know you can help the the best thing to do is to uh to pick clients that you can really help and that wants to be held by you and how do you know what clients you can help if you're starting out well the best way to to do that is um asking questions and start talking to the client in very early stage of the process because you know your own skills and then you start asking questions and then you see if those align with your skills indeed okay it's a little bit rough if you start designing or start developing straight away and you come to the point that you can help them yeah and the more you ask in the beginning the less risk uh you're taking in the rest of the project yeah so you're actually saying that building a business like you have built over here is less risky than trying to to get as many clients as possible probably yes okay okay that's a good point okay so i think we've already learned a lot uh do you have any final thoughts to give to my audience what would you advise for people that are starting out well i think as a designer your job is to create value for clients and for users and i think the more value you provide for clients and for users and the more value you also get yeah so be less selfish and be more value to the clients indeed all right well thank you very much for all of your time no problem thanks for having me yeah that was really cool and i think that a lot of people will get value out of this conversation i hope so all right thank you okay so i hope that this video gave you some inspiration for your own web design process i also hope that you guys like these kind of videos because they are very different from videos that i normally make these videos take a lot of time to make so if you liked the video then please let me know by giving it a like it helps out the channel a lot and it allows me to make more creative videos like this for now a question for you is do you think that this can improve your design process let's start a discussion inside of the comment section below for now i want to thank you for watching and the agency struxxot for making this video possible their instagram and their website will be in the description below and then i hope to see you in the next video on living with pixels [Music] you

Channel: Rino de Boer

Views: 35,765

Keywords: livingwithpixels, living with pixels, elementor adobe xd, adobe xd elementor, elementor design, elementor wordpress, elementor design tutorial, elementor web design, adobe xd process, web design process, never start in elementor, adobe xd website, web design adobe xd, Product design agency, web design agency, design process agency, web design process agency, Agency interview, web design workflow, web design process pro, LWP, why adobe xd, livingwithpixels strakzat, strakzat

Id: zzKomPGnXik

Length: 15min 22sec (922 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 17 2021