3 Ways to Remove Budget While Keeping Design Quality
/In the fast-paced, lowered budget, high expectation world of digital design, small agencies are looking for any way possible to get a project going and approved by their clients. It’s happening at break-neck speed, and sometimes it happens without a lot of care. And, to be honest, that’s a problem.
Why is the craft of visual design becoming the digital experience version of assembly line manufacturing?
PRESSURE IS NOT A GOOD STRATEGY
Q. What’s the fastest way to get a reaction from your design effort?
A. Design something.
However, that mentality kills the process that would produce the right way to approach solving problems and communicating clear directions to the customer. Don’t get me wrong, I fully understand the pressure of getting things accomplished on time/on budget - but getting them done with arbitrary deadlines and pressure from above is not a good strategy to producing effective results.
WHAT DOES IT REALLY TAKE?
The totality of design includes (in varying degrees of depth) the following components:
RESEARCH - You can’t actually do any kind of effective design unless you know the what/who/why of the output.
PLANNING - Whether you’re working with an AOR (Agency of Record) who has the planning chops to carry out the ethnography and research to find the insights that matter, or you’re working from an existing set of insights, you need “some” level of planning.
MEASUREMENT - How are you going to know if something worked? At the very least, you need to set the baseline, and understand where people are, and what you want from them as they experience your offering.
PROTOTYPING - The step that most marketers can’t stand - this process takes all of your input/data/insights, and puts it down in a way that allows for malleability and testing. Prototyping is not the design. It’s not even the final idea. But, it is a fantastic way to explore options and theories that ultimately become the design.
TESTING - When you do have everything lined up, and you’ve started the process, it’s a very solid idea to test things with real customers. They’ll be very (sometimes “too”) happy to tell you if you’re on the right track.
REWORK - It’s important in any project to leave a little budget for rework. It can happen in the following phases, but I can’t stress enough that a project is never done. Even campaigns change (just look at the commercials that run, get tested, get reworked, then rebroadcast).
OMG THIS IS SO EXPENSIVE
Well, sometimes. But, it doesn’t have to be. Here are three ways you could potentially save time and money, yet still get the right results:
Sketch v. Wireframes v. Prototypes - I’ve personally had an internal debate about the efficacy of the rapid prototype method, but it’s certainly a way to speed up the process of getting ideas and concepts in front of people quicker. In a rapid prototype scenario, you craft any of the aforementioned deliverables in a way that emulates the final product, testing and making edits as you go along, with the idea that speed is the master of progress. In some scenarios, this works great because it keeps the foot on the gas. This is especially effective with a team that is well-aware of the goals, and are all established on the same approach. Our approach? Always expect to do experience flows to map out what the customer will experience, then decide how you want to deliver the architecture.
Planning via Quick Research - You don’t always have the budget (or the need, to be honest) to do a fully baked planning effort. However, you should consider some baselines before you venture into any solution. As mentioned above in the ways you prototype, everyone has to be on the same page in order to quickly deliver. That means when you plan, you need to ensure the team is ready to go with a specific set of insights and data sets that have either been proven in your industry, or in your customer feedback loop. Our approach? We honestly don’t want to rush into anything unless we’re sure there’s a reason for you and your customer to do something. Any amount of planning is better than no planning at all.
Collaborate - You’d think this is a no-brainer, but I can’t believe how many silos still exist in experience design. While everyone needs space to create (don’t hover!), we all need rapid input and validation to get to a solution. Pairing an experience architect with a visual designer, or a ux designer with a front-end developer, or a front-end developer with a designer and a back-end engineer is the only way you’ll actually save time and money. Counterintuitive to what you’d think: Adding people to the team in the beginning means fewer rework efforts in the deployment and testing phases. Our approach? We make sure that the entire delivery team is at least aware of how things will be done - from designing to the languages used, to the ways in which we’ll be framing up the solution. Each hand needs to know what the other is doing, whether we all work for the same organization or not.
HOW DO WE START SAVING IF WE’VE ALREADY BEGUN?
Even if you’re knee-deep in the hoopla, you can still realize savings. It’s important to examine whether or not you have the right level of features to get the product out the door. This doesn’t mean you should fall back on the “MVP” (minimally viable product) approach, but it does mean you should look at cutting features. Do you need search in phase 1? What if you integrated a third-party tool instead of trying to build it out yourself? We’ve helped so many organizations rationalize the approach of their projects, and on average, we believe you can easily course-correct and get things going the right way.
We’re happy to help. All you have to do is say hello.