A Platform For Creativity - Counting Stars: Creativity Over Predictability - Responsive Web Design, Part 2 (2015)

Responsive Web Design, Part 2 (2015)

Counting Stars: Creativity Over Predictability

A Platform For Creativity

My company works mostly in client services. We work with small and medium-sized businesses and sometimes with larger organizations. I know that not everyone likes dealing with clients, but we like the variety of people we work with and the challenges that they bring us.

Our work’s mostly rewarding, frequently challenging and it’s sometimes frustrating. We’ve found that one of the best ways to eliminate that occasional frustration is to start a project and a client relationship in ways which emphasize creativity.

We try to ensure that everyone understands that the most effective solution to a problem will probably be something that no one has yet thought of; that prior work, often in the form of specifications, personas, user stories or wireframes, should inform and not dictate that solution; that approaching a project in this way will encourage a process that’s respectful to everyone, be creatively fruitful and, above all, successful.

HOW MUCH FOR A WEBSITE?

I think every designer has their own “how much for a website” email story. We joke about these inquiries, but they don’t just demonstrate a potential client’s misunderstanding of the commissioning process. They present us with an opportunity to do what we should do best, to communicate well and build trust while we develop relationships.

If you’re part of a design team, think back to an inquiry you received recently. How specific was what you were sent? Was it embarrassingly vague, fastidiously complex, or somewhere on a spectrum in between?

Some inquiries are little more than an attempt to start a conversation: a “Hey, we’d like to talk to you about a project.” Some offer more insight, and others provide requirements that are so detailed that they verge on becoming specifications, complete with personas, user stories or wireframes.

While professionals have experience in starting new projects, a prospective client may have little or no experience of commissioning design work. It’s common among inexperienced people to want us to direct the process. This vagueness allows us to set the direction and tone for a conversation and use that opportunity to hear a client explain their business and learn how our work can help them. It’s during these early conversations that we can begin to build relationships.

When we handle early interactions well, we earn the opportunity to help shape a client’s brief which will ultimately lead to a more creatively flexible project.

Not every client offers an invitation to talk. Instead, some offer insight and outline specific goals that coincidentally often follow the order of questions they’ve found on agencies’ request for proposal forms. Agencies routinely ask prospective clients to complete a request for proposal form, so clients have learned to format their information in a similar way.

It’s important to remember that a request for a proposal isn’t the same as a creative brief, even though the two are regularly conflated.

Mike Monteiro is the founder of Mule Design and the author of Design Is a Job22. In his book, he shared his agency’s screener questions. They start with questions like, “What’s the primary business and structure of your organization?” before moving on to ask about motives and goals, and how the client rates the importance of strategy, design, engineering, writing and, finally, cost. This helps Mule Design to quickly understand a client’s priorities. Do they value cost over design? How will they measure success?

Earlier, I mentioned the importance of confidence and the Mule Design team communicate theirs through their screener questions. Their final question is one that most of us think, but too few ask:

“How many people are you talking to and when do you expect to be making a decision?”

Most importantly of all, Mule Design doesn’t ask questions that demand a client suggests a solution, because it’s those solutions we are ultimately paid to create.

IT DOESN’T FIT THE BRIEF

It’s common for clients to provide detailed requirement documents that verge on functional specifications. These sometimes include site maps, wireframes and detailed descriptions of a site’s content structure and functionality. This documentation may be useful in the future, but we need to ask why they are sending it to us now. Do they think that we’ll be able to estimate a price more easily? Watch out for this, as designers often make the mistake of discussing price before a client has agreed in principle to hire them.

Have you ever worked under a brief that was designed to be a checklist, intended to judge creative work, rather than as a platform for it? A brief shouldn’t be prescriptive; nor should it contain solutions, as no designer likes to see their job attempted before they’ve started.

A prescriptive brief is often a client’s attempt to add predictability to a creative process that should embrace the unexpected. In the worst cases, it provides a framework under which work that doesn’t conform to predetermined expectations can be rejected, simply by saying, “It doesn’t fit the brief.”

SOLVING PROBLEMS, NOT DEFINING THEM

People who crave predictability often see creative work as akin to anarchy, and a seemingly risky process with an undetermined outcome can be a daunting prospect. The way some people attempt to compensate is by solving problems instead of defining them.

Receiving a brief that includes answers instead of questions should serve as a warning as it usually indicates that a person is nervous about hiring or is unfamiliar with working with designers and so is trying to stay in control by circumventing the design process.

It can tell us that the client already has an idea of the work they want to see. More worrying is that work is probably something they’ve seen somewhere else. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in a brief that contains a “Sites we like” section. These are the creative equivalent of the slick haircut photographs you’ll find on barbershop walls.

Never acknowledge even the existence of that prior work. If a client mentions it, politely remind them that they’re hiring you to design a solution to their problem, not copy another designer’s solution to someone else’s. The truth is that no one can predict where a solution will come from. Nor can we predict what it form it will take. What we can know is that it will probably not conform to predetermined assumptions, and we must help clients understand that.

It’s natural for clients to want to avoid risk. After all, who wakes up thinking, “I want to have a risky day?” Even gamblers part with their money with the expectation that their bet is sound. So how can we explain the importance of an unrestricted creative process without frightening clients with talk of risk? Replace the word “risky” with something else. I replace it with “inspiring.”

STRIKE UP A CONVERSATION

If you receive a prescriptive brief, you should use it to foster discussions that develop trust and build relationships.

It’s in some people’s nature to want to define what a designer makes even before we start work. Why would someone want to control the design process this way? It’s possible that they’re simply not used to hiring designers, that they’re unfamiliar with both the commissioning and the creative processes. So they try to shape them both into something that feels familiar. We need to resist this as much as we can, by explaining to a client that inspiring solutions only come from unpredictable sources.

When a brief dictates design specifics, use it as an opportunity to speak to the person who wrote it. And I do mean speak — don’t email, just pick up the phone. Introduce yourself and ask questions about why a client is presenting solutions so early.

This approach will help both of you, and it will also help differentiate you from the 29 other agencies the client wrote to. As Mike Monteiro wrote in Design Is a Job:

“Make friends with the person who wrote it. Strike up a conversation with them and get as much detail as you can.”

We should never take a brief at face value and ought to question it, challenge it, interrogate every part of it. If that sounds familiar, it should, as it takes us back to Cennydd Bowles’ “Letter to a Junior Designer” when he wrote:

“Ideas aren’t to be trusted. They need to be wrung dry, ripped apart.”

Simply replace the word “ideas” with “creative briefs” or “requests for proposals.”

A brief should help define a strategy to be followed not just in the next piece of work, but in the months and years following. The strategy is as much for the client to follow as their design partners.

When we receive a brief, it’s our responsibility to question not only what has been written, but why. It doesn’t mean being awkward, simply that we’re already thinking about a problem. As Mike Monteiro wrote in his article “These 8 Tricks to Selecting a Design Partner Will Amaze You23”:

“Your designer’s goal should be your success, not your happiness. So don’t work with anyone who just automatically bends to all of your whims and wishes.”

Asking why not only helps clients and designers to understand what’s at stake, it also sparks conversations that will inevitably lead to opportunities. It’s the most important question we can ask when presented with a brief.

A FINE LINE BETWEEN CONTROL AND CHAOS

A client may be the best in their chosen field. They might be an expert in making their product or delivering their service, but that doesn’t necessarily make them the best qualified to write a brief. That’s where designers should step in — not to write the brief for them, but to work on it as a joint venture.

Writing a brief often walks a fine line between control and chaos, and it’s the designer’s role to help achieve that balance. If designers want to avoid being presented with a brief that lacks strategy and contains predefined solutions, we shouldn’t allow a client to write it in isolation. Instead, we should make it clear that before we can help them implement a strategy, we must first help them define it.

It’s essential that a brief should have a clear, singular voice that states a single, simple purpose. Ideally, it should be written by just one person, someone who has the power to accept what may become an unpredictable design process that in turn might lead to unconventional work, but that’s not always possible.

What can designers do when there’s not a single person who can take responsibility? We should work with a client to help them develop that singular voice, a voice with the clarity to communicate their goals in the most concise way.

Before we ask a client to think about what we’re going to make, we should encourage them to think about their business. After all, they know it better than we do. We should start by listening and understanding their business goals. We need to aim to see things from a client’s perspective as we’re ultimately working for them and no one else. This is not the time to talk about a user’s goals, but the goals of the business, be they to communicate better or to sell more. This focus on a business’s needs rather than a customer’s could be seen as conflicting with the goals of user experience.

To be most effective, we shouldn’t conduct these conversations via a written brief. The best way for designers to start building a relationship with clients is to sit and talk with them face-to-face. As well as helping to earn their trust, these conversations also establish us as organized and serious about what we do.

When we understand what a client is aiming to achieve, we can help them reduce the brief to a set of clear goals understood by everyone who will contribute during the project and long after it.

A brief should outline a client’s goals, which might include:

•We need a website for our company/organization or campaign.

•I want to sell more of my product than my competitors.

•We need a website that performs well on every size and type of screen.

Every brief should express business goals like these. It should describe challenges, explain opportunities and even talk about dreams. A brief’s most important role is to inspire people to do inspiring creative work. To achieve this, the brief must be a friend to creative thinking, not its enemy. It should act as a platform for creative thinking, not a set of chains to drag it down. Above all, it should inspire and never limit creativity. It must respect the creative process while at the same time communicate the problems a client is trying to solve.