When the Client Becomes the Expert: Collaborative Product Design
The best product design work happens when client domain expertise and design practice expertise genuinely combine — not when one side defers to the
Mark Feane, Head of Digital at FBD Insurance, said something in his feedback on the FBD project that has stayed with me: 'You can't underestimate trust when working with an agency.' It's a simple observation, but it points to something important about how the best digital product work actually happens.
Domain Expertise Is Not Optional
No product design team, however talented, can produce great work in a domain they don't understand. Clinical UX requires genuine clinical knowledge. Financial product design requires understanding of how Irish consumers relate to money and financial institutions. Energy sector product design requires understanding of how power generation and trading actually work.
On the ESB RTV Platform project, some of the most important design decisions came directly from conversations with plant managers and energy traders — people who had been doing their jobs for twenty years and had highly specific mental models of what good operational information looked like. We wouldn't have got there from first principles.
The Knowledge Transfer Challenge
On the LUMA Vision project, the client knowledge transfer challenge was at its most intense. Designing clinical interfaces for cardiac catheterisation procedures required genuine understanding of the clinical workflow — the sequence of steps in a procedure, the information states at each step, the specific decisions that needed to be made and when.
We built structured knowledge transfer into the project methodology: observation sessions, shadowing, and detailed task analysis with clinical staff before any design work started. The insights from this phase fundamentally shaped the architecture of the platform in ways that no amount of UX expertise alone would have produced.
When to Push Back
Genuine collaboration requires the ability to push back as well as to listen. Clients are experts in their domain; they are not always experts in what their users need. On more than one project, the most valuable contribution the design team made was challenging a client assumption about user behaviour that turned out to be wrong.
On the AA Ireland project, the assumption that car insurance customers were primarily price-motivated — and that the quote journey should therefore lead with price — turned out to be significantly overstated. Research showed that confidence in the cover was at least as important as price for a significant proportion of customers. Redesigning the journey to build confidence before surfacing price improved both conversion and customer satisfaction.
