It doesn’t matter what you’re designing: It could be an app, a website or the food truck for your gourmet PB&J sandwich bar. The following tips will maximize the efficiency with which you work with your designer. They will guarantee a better experience and better results, both short-term and long-term.
Psyched?
Let’s start at the very beginning.
1. Brain sync on project management and expectations
Everyone involved in a design process has predictions and assumptions of how the process will work. That’s to be expected. It’s when those expectations aren’t synced that you run into issues.
I once started working on a project where it was understood that I needed the client to provide their proprietary graphic assets. But a week went by, and there was no sign of the assets. Another half a week passed…
Finally I reached out to the client. “No one has sent me the graphic assets,” I told him.
“Oh,” was the reply, “the team members really need you to light a fire under them. Just be on top of them each week until they send you what you need for that week’s deliverables.”
I had not known I was signing on as de facto project manager. Badgering the client’s team members was not part of the job description.
Don’t let this happen to your project. Before you start doing anything, have a brain syncing session with your designer. Clarify expectations and role definement on anything and everything, including:
how every deliverable should be structured
what software will be used to make the delivery
timelines and due dates
who it will be handed over to
where it will be stored
how many revisions are included
preferred mode of communications and updates
frequency of updates
payment schedules
who is managing the project (or different parts of the project)
That last one is important because project management, when done well, is an invisible job. It therefore tends to be forgotten about or taken for granted… until the lack of it strands the entire project on the rocks. Smart people (that’s you) make provisions for project management.
Once you and your designer have expectations synced, relax and enjoy! You’ve cleared potential bumps from the road and can now have fun with the design process.
2. Practice the art of descriptive feedback
“I think this interface needs something… I’m not sure what. Could you make it better?”
If you’ve ever received feedback like this, you’re probably shaking your head or rolling your eyes.
If you’ve ever given feedback like this, you should be ashamed.
Just kidding! No shaming and blaming here. I’m all about helping you get more out of your design process.
So without further ado, here’s some descriptive feedback on how to give better descriptive feedback.
Don’t: “I don’t like this page. Please redo it.” (non-descriptive feedback)
Do: “The colors on this page don’t seem lively or fun enough.” (descriptive feedback)
Don’t: “No one will sign up for this app; the design is terrible.” (non-descriptive feedback)
Do: “I hate all the screens in this onboarding process. They have way too much text on them and they take too much effort to get through.” (descriptive feedback)
The ability to give descriptive feedback can be your most effective time and money-saving skill when working with any creative or creative team. The more specific and descriptive your feedback is, the faster your designer can fix the issue without wasting time trying to figure out what you meant.
It does often happen that you can’t describe the problem clearly. You just feel that something is wrong and you need the designer’s help to figure it out.
Guess what? There’s also a descriptive way to describe a lack of clarity. (Meta, no?)
Don’t: “I just don’t like this. Can you start again?” (non-descriptive feedback)
Do: “I think we got sidetracked here and the design might have lost some focus. I’m not feeling it anymore. Can you figure out what happened?” (descriptive feedback)
Descriptive feedback is empowering - for you, for your designer, and usually for all stakeholders involved.
3. Invest in a design system
“I’d like to start with designing just this one piece of the app. I don’t know how much budget I’ll have later, and want to get what I can now.”
Your user experience isn’t intended to be a bunch of tiny disjointed pieces. Your customers will back me up on that too. They see your user experience as ‘one thing’ which is either good or bad - not as a combo of different parts.
If part of that experience is built well and part is built poorly, the entire experience goes down the drain.
Your product, in most cases, needs to be a holistic, seamless, cohesive experience in order to survive sustainably in the market.
Setting up a design system (in a tool like Figma) at the beginning of a design project is an investment of a week or two, but it pays incredible dividends: Once you have your design system in place, you can work at lightning speed without ever having to worry that your designs will look haphazard or inconsistent with your brand. It’s essentially like having your wireframes and visual design done all at once rather than in two stages. It also allows you to easily pass on the work to other designers and content writers, or to scale your design team later on.
That two-week ramp up, where it can feel like “nothing is getting done,” is an investment both in the speed of the design process and in the quality of the end result.
I was part of a team redesigning an interface. The team based most of the interface in a design system, but some parts of the interface that were used infrequently (we saw this in the user data) were designed outside of the system, almost as an afterthought. If almost no one uses it, we thought, it shouldn’t be a big deal if the design isn’t so amazing.
We discovered our mistake in reasoning after the new design was launched and we had been collecting data on it for a few months. The system’s power users were few in number, but it turned out that THEY were the ones who actually wanted to use the least-designed parts of the interface. They were very frustrated by the lack of care we had put into it. We started getting complaints saying things like, “When I tried to use that part of the interface, I wanted to cry!”
Oh, no. Those parts were used infrequently by the vast majority of system users… but they were used frequently and heavily by the most important users on the platform. By skimping on a cohesive design experience, the team ended up frustrating their core base.
Fortunately, when you have already created a design system, these problems can be fixed fairly easily, even after some damage has been done! The key is, of course, to use that system to move quickly and improve design as soon as you see that it’s causing trouble.
4. Share product challenges and weaknesses with your designer
Way back when in the initial stages of your product or app, you probably had a good idea of the opportunities you wanted to capitalize on, as well as the challenges you might face along the way.
When you crafted your pitch, you (rightly) gave top billing to the opportunities. You then spent the next year telling everyone - from VCs to your mom - about how amazing the opportunity and the market are.
The challenges and weaknesses? Well, they’re still there, but they’re not such a big deal… right? Certainly not something worth mentioning to your designer?
Think again.
Your designer doesn’t need to hear your pitch. Just the opposite: being upfront with your designer about the challenges you face is often a powerful first step toward finding solutions.
I once had a client who wanted a native app for a coaching business. Every function in it, however, looked like it could be done within a Facebook Group. Yet, in our meetings, my client hadn’t brought up the idea that Facebook Groups would be her competition.
Had she brought it up, we could have addressed that challenge directly through design - and we did, once I mentioned it to her! We discussed different strategies to design for adoption: would we want her product to look different from, or intentionally resemble, parts of the Facebook UI to match user expectation.
In order for any of these things to happen, your designer needs to know about the threats and challenges facing your product.
Maybe they will ask. But if they don’t, it’s up to you to bring up the looming issues, to pull them out from under the table where they hide at investor and stakeholder meetings. Get these issues onto your designer’s table - and deal with them together.
5. Make retrospectives a habit
It’s disappointing when you end a design project and you’re unhappy with how some aspect of the design turned out.
It’s REALLY disappointing when you could have been happy, except you didn’t tell your designer in time to have it changed.
After an experience where I only found out that my client was unhappy with his app’s onboarding flow a month after we had finished that piece of the design, I was pretty frustrated. Had he mentioned it earlier, we could have fixed it to his satisfaction. Now, it was going to have to delay development.
From that point on, I made retrospectives an inherent part of my design process. My client retrospective is usually a one hour meeting where we go over what did and did not work in the project so far.
Here are the questions I use to guide my retrospectives:
What did we set out to accomplish in the timeframe in question?
What did we actually accomplish?
What did you feel went well?
What did you feel needed to be improved?
What could we have done differently?
What could we do differently in the future knowing what we know?
What are the next steps?
The frequency of retrospectives should be tailored to the project. Often my projects call for a monthly retrospective. For time-sensitive projects where pieces need to get delivered each week or two, a weekly or biweekly retro can work even better. The key is ensuring that both client and designer get to give timely feedback and feel good about doing so.
6. Keep in touch with your designer
If you have a successful product, it will grow and change as time passes. Staying in touch with your designer will not only give you quick access to her design skills, but also to her knowledge and appreciation of your users.
Six months after I designed the UI for a smart home management app, the client wanted to consult with me. “App adoption and use has been great in general, but less so among people with families. We’re wondering if parents want to have more control or visibility about what their children do before making them users - or if that’s not the issue at all and it would be a waste of time to develop parental controls. When you did that user research, did you get any information that would tell you one way or the other?”
Since I had performed thorough user research as part of our initial design process, I was able to help my client make an informed decision about what her users would appreciate, and where to invest in order to drive higher adoption and retention.
What goes in, will come out
You get out of your design process what you put into it. Invest the time and effort to sync expectations from the get-go, to give descriptive feedback, to create a design system, to share the challenges facing your company and your product, to conduct retrospectives and to touch base with your designer even after the project is done.
It will show - brilliantly - in your final design.
Please note that all names, genders, and industries have been changed in these anecdotes to protect my wonderful clients. We all make mistakes and we learn from them, so it’s ok!