A Highly Intentional Client Portal
Sophie Bujold is the digital community strategist behind Cliqueworthy – a boutique consultancy focused on helping innovators and creative leaders design and grow changemaking online communities.
She came to me wanting to…
- Simplify the number of tools she asks her clients to learn and use
- Give them an easy way to track their progress, find important documents, collaborate with her, and export their work
- Reduce her own admin work – portals were taking her half a day to set up!
Sophie cares deeply about the quality of her client experience and was looking for something of a Goldilocks solution: something robust in its capability but streamlined in its setup, a place where they can interact with her but are also encouraged to self-service. And with that in mind, we set out to create this highly intentional space.
And her clients love it:
“I love our Miro board so much! I’ve never seen a board like the one you’re making for us! It’s so cool!”
-Cliqueworthy Client
We started with a call to explore her needs and ideas.
Who would be deploying each portal? What other services might it need to connect to? What branding assets do we have available? What is the cadence for her engagements? What has she tried before and how did she feel about it? What stumbling blocks do her clients report, and what obstacles does she herself experience? The game plan went through a few iterations and shifts before she settled on using Miro.
Then we moved through the design in stages, from framing out the content blocks to pinning down the exact content and then making it beautiful.
How We Worked Through The Sticky Stuff: Technical Difficulties
During our project, Sophie started getting warning messages from Miro indicating that her boards were too heavy. I didn’t get these messages at all, so I’m glad she pointed it out! We were concerned about this becoming an issue for her clients, especially as they add more content to their boards over time.
To pole vault over that issue:
- I resized the portal to be as small as we could go without compromising readability or print quality, and…
- Created a second, more light-weight version of the portal as a backup. That way, if the client reported problems, Sophie could swap it mid-engagement to alleviate issues on the fly.
