Ask HN: How to communicate professionally to software clients

I'm working on an app with some non-technical people and I noticed that I find it really hard to keep people in the loop of what you've been doing. I want people to understand what I'm working on and why it's taking a certain amount of time, what the result is and most importantly, generating a sense of understanding when things break or don't work as perfect as they expected.

It seems really easy to do with design (just show some screens, explain them, iterate on them, repeat) but the most simple tasks can be hard and the most difficult ones can be simple when programming, and I haven't yet figured out a way to tackle that.

How do you deal with this?