Client Onboarding Portal

The brief came from a small architecture studio that was losing time every week to the same back-and-forth: contracts sent by email, files arriving in different formats, and no single place to track what had been approved. They asked for a portal that would hold the whole first engagement with a client, from the initial questionnaire to the signed project brief.

We started by mapping the real sequence of their onboarding, not the ideal one. The studio had three people handling intake, and each of them kept notes in a different tool. The portal had to work with that reality, so we built the flow around a single shared checklist that everyone could see, with clear owners for each step.

The design decisions followed the studio's existing print materials. We reused the same grid, the same orange accent, and the same grotesque typeface from their brochures, so the portal felt like a natural extension of the brand rather than a separate utility. The interface is deliberately quiet: no dashboards, no charts, just a sequence of forms and confirmations.

• Structured intake form that adapts to project type, so residential and commercial briefs ask different questions.
• Document upload with automatic file naming, which cut the time spent renaming PDFs and DWGs.
• Approval step that locks the brief once the client confirms, preventing scope drift before the project starts.
• Status view for the studio team, showing where each client sits in the sequence without extra reporting.

The portal went live after three weeks of building and two rounds of testing with real clients. The studio reported that the average time from first contact to signed brief dropped from about nine days to four. More importantly, the team stopped chasing files by email, and clients started sending complete information on the first pass because the form told them exactly what was needed.

What made this project work was the constraint. We did not add features that sounded useful in the abstract. Every screen exists because someone on the studio team could point to a specific moment where the old process failed. That discipline kept the portal small, fast, and easy to maintain, which is exactly what a three-person studio needs.