Airbnb and MVM, or how to make clients stick with you Working together is a user experience too.

1. Two familiar situations

Think about what it is like to book a stay on Airbnb. You pick the dates, look at the photos, and with a few taps the booking is done, and at the end you know exactly when you can arrive and where.

Now think about sorting out a matter with a large utility company, say MVM, the Hungarian state energy company. There you can expect far more steps and waiting, which is understandable, since at a utility company regulations and long-standing systems also shape the process. Even so, the two situations show the difference between the system carrying the burden and the customer carrying it.

2. The burden is always somewhere

Airbnb is so easy to use because a great system works behind it. You do not have to handle the payment or the arrangements with the host, because someone has designed that for you, and the service does the work for you in the background.

One important rule follows from this. If we want to take a burden off one side, we have to move it to the other, because the work itself remains and somebody still has to do it. The less weight is left on the user’s shoulders, the better the user experience can be, and the more gladly they come back.

3. The same in working together

A business collaboration works in exactly the same way. If working with you feels like booking on Airbnb, your client will not look elsewhere, since they have no reason to. For that, you need to take over the burdens they are carrying now, possibly without them ever having mentioned it.

A burden like that is when the client has to dig through their inbox for an earlier file, or has to fit a whole meeting into their calendar for one simple question. One by one these are small things, yet each of them makes working with you a little harder, and in the end they add up to the feeling the client keeps about the work you did together.

4. What you can do about it

The good news is that you do not need to build a whole system for this. How easy you are to work with often comes down to small habits, and you can change those from tomorrow.

• Pass on information concisely and clearly, so nobody has to untangle what you want.
• Instead of writing “I attached it last time”, attach the file again and say where in it the thing you mean can be found.
• If an email will do, do not organise an unnecessary meeting.
• Take notes in meetings so you do not have to ask again afterwards.
• Do not call if a short message is enough.
• Prepare whatever you can in a ready-to-use form, such as the contract or the meeting link.

Each of these seems minor on its own, yet together they make exactly the difference you feel between a smooth booking and a complicated errand.

5. Your own friction points

The list could be much longer, and in your work there may be friction in other places too. Notice which behaviours make your own life harder when you work with others, and do those things differently yourself. Now and then it is also worth asking your clients what drains most of their energy in your work together.

We do the same with interfaces. When we design a website or an app, we look for the places where the user carries a burden the system should carry, and we move that work to where it belongs.