Stepping into Oz: Managing and Delivering Successful Visual Design

By Julia Houck-Whitaker 0 Comments

When a project transitions from interaction design to visual design, the design team joins hands with the client and walks into the world of color, as optimistic as Dorothy and her troupe. Alas, it's also the time when personal likes and dislikes can cloud the road towards what is truly the best experience. With the help of some of the industry's experts, in this week's essay I explore managing a successful visual design process.



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Julia Houck-Whitaker - julia at adaptivepath dot com
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Stepping into Oz: Managing & Delivering

Successful Visual Design
Getting to the right visual design can be the trickiest part of a design project. One of the key reasons is that some clients have a hard time saying clearly what they want from the visual design. This doesn’t mean they’re inarticulate—it’s just that reactions to visuals are often much more subjective and emotional than reactions to other deliverables, like say, research findings. Project managers and designers joke about getting feedback like “I don’t like blue,” which isn’t much help as a guide to their work.



And the stakes are high for visual design. Every client knows that visuals are, quite literally, what the customer will see, so they have to be on-brand, have to set the right tone, and work for what they have to accomplish. Design firms, meanwhile, know that without a successful visual design, they can’t create a great user experience, and they’ll have wasted the time and effort they spent on research, strategy, and interaction design.



How can design teams get to a successful visual design with their clients? To find out when to include visual designers, how to introduce constraints, and how to get good input and feedback, I talked to a couple of AP’s resident experts—Visual Practice Lead Kumi Akiyoshi and Senior Experience Designer Andrew Crow—as well as some of our friends in the industry, including Michael Polivka, Project Management and Design Engineering Team Lead at Hot Studio; Erica Hall, Lead Strategist at Mule Design; and Laura Scott, Associate Designer at Pentagram.



Getting Started: Involve Visual Designers Early & Often

To make sure visual design succeeds, teams need to include visual designers in the initial scoping phase. Getting them involved early gives them the opportunity to share their expertise, and buy into the timeline that they're going to be working with. Just because the research, strategy, and interaction design phases come first in the process, doesn’t mean that they’re anymore important than the visual design phase. Kumi points out that this also allows them to voice any concerns right off the bat, and communicate what other project phases they need to be involved in. And getting visual designers working with the whole project team can help everyone better understand how the rest of the team makes decisions.



Sometimes it’s impossible to include visual designers in every phase that takes place before visual design starts—every stakeholder and research interview, or every strategy and interaction design session. When this is the case, the rest of the team should bring them up to speed by reviewing themes that came out of the phases leading up to visual design before they take center stage.



Balancing Constraints

As early as possible, the design team needs to know about any constraints on its work, or on how it will be implemented. The best time to get this information is in the course of initial stakeholder interviews.



If a client has style guides, font specifications, or other formatting specs, designers need these before they begin work. Likewise, they need to know what the development team can and can’t handle. For example, rounding corners on pictures is notorious for giving developers headaches. Addressing these kinds of issues early can mitigate problems early. Michael from Hot Studio notes, “Comps are beautiful and may look like the right solution for the client, but their internal team or the CMS they've picked out can't support it. Across the board, it's about getting enough technical representation upfront to provide checks and balances.”



As Michael also mentions, some visual designers may not do their best work if confronted with too many constraints, so teams need to work to keep them to a minimum. (This is especially true if a team is in the less than ideal situation of bringing on a visual designer late in the project.) “It’s important not to clip the designer’s wings,” he says.  They need to be able to apply their expertise, and not simply color in the interaction designer’s wireframes. Otherwise the visual design phase may not be as successful as it can be, which can lead to the project as a whole not succeeding. After all, it’s the goal of this phase to create something that will be the basis for revamping the client’s website, collateral, or entire company identity. And clients hire outside design help because what they’ve been doing in these areas doesn’t work any longer.



Collaborating with the Client

When a visual design team begins work, how do they know where to start? In addition to studying previous phases of the project, they can also conduct a workshop with the client team—a great way to get critical information that would otherwise take weeks to gather in the course of iterating on designs. There are other ways to get this early, but workshops are collaborative and transparent, building a strong working relationship between the design team and the client.

During these workshops, clients have the opportunity to share existing designs that show how their own problems could be solved. Another useful workshop exercise is drawing up a list of words that best describe the client company or its brand—Laura Scott notes that Pentagram does this when creating an identity for a client. Pentagram’s visual designer then creates clusters of similar words, as well as similar visual elements, giving everyone the chance to discuss which combinations work, and which don’t. Using simple methods like dot-voting, the client and design team can then decide collectively which words and images should guide designers in their work.



“Lost in Translation” Prevention

When embarking on this trip to a color-filled world with a client team, we’ve found it’s critical to use concrete examples in discussing designs. There’s this great scene in Gary Hustwit’s film, Helvetica, where two designers talk about what they need by using musical examples. One says to the other “It feels kind of Erik Satie; it needs to be Debussy.” This sort of thing can work well when everyone shares the same frame of reference. But this isn’t necessarily true when talking with clients. As Andrew points out, “‘clean’ can mean ‘sparse’ to one person and ‘straight lines' to another.” Asking for concrete examples, and defining what abstract terms mean, makes for more successful design delivery. The delivery process can be much smoother by explaining guidelines to the client, especially how to provide feedback. This in turn will save your project team time, and increase the client’s confidence in the design team.



Showing the Work: A Picture is Not Worth A Thousand Words

When presenting the visual design to the client, it's tempting to forego the foreplay, and do the “big reveal” —but in this case, a picture is not worth a thousand words.



Before presenting the visual design, it's mission-critical to remind the client of decisions that have been made in shaping it, and about all other factors that influenced the design direction—including the results of the workshop where both teams were present. Also, if the client team includes a visual designer, figure out how they can support the process. Their designer will likely be the person using the work when the outside design firms steps away. It may work best to get the designer’s opinion during the visual design process before presenting it to the rest of the client team, and it will likely work well to have that person attend the presentation, if the client team will rely on their professional opinion in assessing the design.



Above all, it's the design team's responsibility never to put work in front of a client that they wouldn't want to see out in the world. As Laura Scott and Michael Polivka both point out, there's an unwritten law that the client will almost always pick the design direction that the project team knows isn’t wise. Putting the wrong design in front of a client can mean having to backpedal, or move a visual design forward even though the team doesn’t support it.



Rinse Repeat: Improving the Work

A client may not like any of the visual design directions a design team presents. If this is the case, the team should focus on finding out why each approach solves, or doesn’t solve, the client’s problem. Getting this information from the client, in writing, ensures that the client both articulates concrete reasons for being dissatisfied, and takes ownership of this opinion.

It’s also important to be specific about what the design team needs feedback on in each call. Asking for feedback on the photography or typography, for example, can help the client focus on key elements of a design. Likewise, it’s important to have the main client contact collect and consolidate feedback from his or her team, and resolve any internal disagreements, before giving that feedback to the design team.



In my conversation with Erika Hall, she made an important distinction between design feedback and art direction. When soliciting input from a client, it’s important to get design feedback, “That doesn’t work because it looks too much like the Amazon site and we need to distinguish ourselves from them.” It’s not useful, she says, to get art direction —“make that green instead of blue.”  Laura Scott, meanwhile, points out a good way to steer clients away from giving art direction: delivering three very distinct and different design directions, and not three that look similar. This reduces the chance of winding up with a “dog's dinner” design, as a result of the client asking the team to combine elements of different design directions, to create a new one.



I find that it can be very gratifying to get extremely positive feedback on a review call. When a client says, “This is great,” I want to dance out of their office. However, as Erika reminded me, it’s important to know not just why a client thinks a specific design direction doesn’t solve a problem, but why another one does. Requesting this information also sets a precedent, showing how important good feedback is, and reduces the chances that a project will drag on, with additional feedback coming days or weeks later.



Finding the Wizard of Oz

When we’re in the weeds of the design process, things are rarely neat and jolly. However, by remembering to: involve the visual designers early and often, gather all constraints early, avoid presenting visuals to clients without first walking through the decisions that influenced the design, and presenting three distinctly different design directions the visual design process can go more smoothly.



Clients can participate more successfully in the design process by working with the design team in workshops or other collaborative activities, provide concrete examples of what they think will solve their problem, and provide feedback as opposed to art direction.



If you follow the yellow brick road, you'll bring your clients to the Wizard of Oz. This place is also know as a happy client that raves about your visual design direction.

 

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2, 2008 at 11:12 am.

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