Every question you need to ask for your creative briefs

Working for an in-house design crew signifies that your colleagues will assume you might have all of the context you should create your designs. You all work for a similar firm, so that you all know all of the issues, proper? Not a lot.

You should be positive you might have all the fitting inputs earlier than attending to work in order that your work is rooted in enterprise objectives and technique. 

There are a pair methods to do that. In some instances, you may begin with a challenge temporary, which lays out the issue to resolve, the viewers, and what success and/or failure appears like. That evolves right into a strategic temporary, which takes the issue and combines it with analysis and cultural insights to carve house for it in a artistic sandbox.

Of course, not each design want comes with a challenge temporary or strategic temporary. Some initiatives are too small to advantage them, whereas others are too pressing to require them. That's why I put collectively a kind to gather all of the inputs essential to create my design briefs.

What is a design temporary?

A design temporary is a doc that features all the knowledge that you simply, as a designer, must execute on the objectives of a given challenge. 

The purpose of a design temporary is to kind pointers that depart nice potential for artistic output however are additionally aware of any immovable constraints (funds, timeline, individuals, and so forth). Ideally, it units up your crew to lean on their strengths and permits them to stretch in significant methods whereas additionally assembly the necessities.

Create an consumption kind

If you do not have a challenge or strategic temporary to work from, I like to recommend having all design requests be submitted via an in depth consumption kind. The data in that kind will will let you get the context you should craft your temporary. 

Here are the questions on our consumption kind at Zapier, that are strategically damaged into three teams:

1. Requester information, like identify and e-mail, for a degree of contact

2. High-level information, like stakeholders, urgency, and metrics

3. Detailed information, like viewers, success/failure indications, and benchmarks

First off, let's evaluate some easy particulars.

Next: high-level information.

• Who has final deciding authority on this challenge?

• Provide a full description of the challenge. The extra data, the higher! Include the issue you are attempting to resolve, and/or what you hope to perform.

• Do you recognize what KPI this corresponds with? Y/N

• If so, which?

• What's the deadline to get this again to you for evaluate?

• How pressing is that this challenge? High (inside a couple of days); Medium (inside a couple of weeks); Low (every time, tbh)

• Where can we discover background data, analysis docs, or different contextual reference? This query is required. Please embrace hyperlinks to docs or related Slack convos. The extra context, the higher!

• Is this for a evaluate, or is it new work?

• Have you talked to the Product Marketing crew about this challenge?

Lastly: strategic stuff (technical time period)

• Describe your target market. The extra particular, the higher. For instance: who they're, how we are going to attain them, what we would like them to really feel.

• What motion do we would like them to take? 

• Why ought to they imagine us?

• What metric can we hope to maneuver or what are we going to measure to see if we're profitable? 

• Have you already recognized content material wants moreover design? If so, are you already working with somebody on these wants?

• Do you might have any optimistic benchmarks in thoughts for this challenge? For instance, different manufacturers, opponents, or related initiatives that you simply admire?

• Have you created any work to date (it is okay if you have not)? If so, please present hyperlinks.

• Is this content material crucial to the completion of different duties, initiatives, or work? Describe how this suits into the general scope of labor.

Get notified of requests

I like to recommend sending all kind submissions to 1 spot. At Zapier, now we have a #brand-requests Slack channel, and a abstract of the responses is robotically despatched to that channel every time somebody clicks submit on our kind.

The requester will get tagged within the thread, which permits for all dialog concerning the challenge to stay in a single place.

This all occurs robotically with a Zap. 

When the request comes via, our crew has a high-level understanding of the challenge, and we're capable of shortly triage who works on it. 

Automatically create your design temporary

You may take it one step additional and autopopulate a Google Docs design temporary template every time you get a submission. For instance, you might create a Google Doc with the next headings (or no matter your design temporary consists of):

Then you might port the information out of your kind into this template so you might have a ready-to-go design temporary to start out with—you'll be able to at all times make tweaks after it is created. If that seems like one of the best route in your crew, here is the way to create and autopopulate a Google Docs template.

There's a well-known quote (usually attributed to Charles Kettering, former Head of Research at General Motors): "a problem well-stated is half-solved." Regardless of the questions you ask, following a repeatable course of like this enables challenge house owners an opportunity to get granular with their wants—and units up the artistic crew to do their finest work.