UX is Process: Designing From a Creative Brief
Unlike traditional brief formats, a UX Creative Brief challenges us to redefine our beliefs about what is possible
In This Series:
- How to Intake a New Project
- Actionable User Insight
- Design from a Creative Brief (you are here)
- The Design Sprint that works for you (forthcoming)
Introduction
The first article of this series looked at how a consistent and repeatable intake process can be used to improve team alignment and reduce friction. The second article explored how persona models are used to help designers feel connected to the user research. In this article, I’ll explain how a creative brief pulls all of your research together and sets the stage for a team to design for maximum impact.
A brief is the fulcrum point of your creative strategy. It tells the story of group of people who are suffering to some degree. Oppressed by bad design, legacy process, and unmet needs they toil to extract minimum value in return for their efforts. The brief describes what a design hero could do make a difference, and if saving those poor folk from misery makes us a bit of money? Well, there’s noting wrong with a little reward for our heroism.
Technically speaking, a creative brief connects the user journey to the brand’s value proposition; thereby laying the groundwork for inspired product design.
Who invented this brief and why haven’t I heard of it?
A creative brief is a short document (duh, brief) that distills the complex findings of user research into a well articulated strategy. The first creative brief was introduced by Stanley Pollitt, father of account planning (a precursor of user experience design), in the 1960s. During that era the British made some wonderful ads but the practice remained obscure outside of the United Kingdom.
It took a while, but in the 1990s account planning finally made it to the United States, and few imported it with as much success as John Steele (author, Truth, Lies, and Advertising). By combining American inventiveness with Pollit’s strategic clarity, he catapulted Goodby, Silverstein, and Partners into stardom almost overnight.
Ever heard of got milk?
Of course you have, everyone has. It’s probably the most famous deprivation strategy ever executed. It’s also a vintage Steele-era campaign. Due to the agency’s success their creative brief format was used to train a horde of eager college students in the art of account planning.
I was one of those students.
Many of us never got back into advertising after the 2008 recession. The crashing economy, along with a digital media transformation that agencies weren’t prepared for, created a perfect storm of unemployment. A decade later you can still see the echoes of traditional/digital consolidation in agency names like SapientRazorfish. The mergers continue even now.
Not content to wait out the industry’s realignment, a lot of us were forced to evolve. We used our combined technological fluency and user-centered design training to become a highly influential cohort within the first generation of professional UX Designers.
We still have a deep respect for a well written creative brief.
What Drives a User Experience Design Strategy?
Modern UX and advertising both follow a user-centered design philosophy. That’s why we are able to apply a creative brief within the scope of our own work. The two formats don’t actually diverge until we consider their intended outcomes.
Advertising expresses a “big idea” in a compelling way, which alters the recipient’s perception of a brand, leading to trial or consumption. An advertising creative brief distills the big idea from user research and pitches it to a creative team as strategy. It is a contextual bridge between insight and execution. The campaigns we see all around us are really just clever expressions of that big idea.
Experience designers don’t yet have the big idea. In fact, our stated mission is to design experiences that become the big ideas. Where an advertising strategy derives its power from an emotional selling point, we derive ours from emotional pain points. Emotional pain points drive the creation of an opportunity statement, which anchors a creative strategy. As a designer, you should have crafted one during intake (the first article of this series).
We investigated a whole bunch of questions during the assumptions worksheet activity, then validated the results into an aligned statement of beliefs. At this point we’re going to elevate three of those beliefs royalty. Together they’ll form the backbone of the creative brief:
What opportunity are we going to target?
What user behaviors will define our success?
What primary value do they (the users) seek?
The first question defined our opportunity statement, which stakeholders have already approved so we get to copy and paste it. The opportunity statement expresses both a gap in the market and a place where we can create value for our intended user. It’s our North Star.
The second question defines the actions users will need to take in order to fulfill the opportunity statement. When HD flatscreen TVs successfully penetrated broadband-equipped homes, Netflix saw an opportunity to provide theater-quality experiences to users in the comfort of their living rooms. Taking advantage of that opportunity required users to behave a certain way in their consumption of streaming media. If those behaviors failed to appear then the money invested in Stranger Things would never have been spent. Also, this would have made me sad. I like Stranger Things.
The third question defines the value that users need to perceive when the opportunity is presented to them. The perception of value motivates users to perform behaviors associated with success, and that success is why we’re paid to do this for a living.
A UX Creative Brief takes those core elements, combines them with a bunch of business and technical requirements, then expresses them as a creative strategy. The strategy has a pot of gold at the end. Happy hunting.
The Elements of a UX Creative Brief
The Opportunity Statement
Expresses both a gap in the market and a space where we can create value for the user. This doesn’t suggest what we should design, just why.
Behavioral Goals
What user-behaviors will define our success? List the actions a user will need to take in order to fulfill the opportunity statement.
Who Are We Talking To?
In simple terms, who are the people we are designing for?
How Are People Doing This Now?
Most people are looking for a better, simpler way to get value and that’s our opportunity. How are they getting that value now?
What Are Their Pain Points?
What frustrates people about the way they are doing things today? These are the problems that we need to solve if we want to be perceived as valuable.
What Would Make Them Happy?
What have people told us they want? This is a wish list of things that our potential users would like us to promise them. Dear Santa…
Technical, Branding, Budget, and Regulatory Requirements
Okay this part of the story is pretty dry. It’s necessary though.
When Is The Work Due?
List the expected completion date and any critical milestones
Supporting Documents
In an academic environment the brief is good enough to work from. Out in the business world, however, it can be useful to include some supporting documents. They aren’t super useful to creatives, but their addition prevents mission-critical details from getting lost along the way.
A list of stakeholders
This may seem like a small thing, but I define a stakeholder as anyone who can derail the train. Few things are more frustrating than someone you haven’t heard from in 3 months declaring an emergency stop because a business requirement wasn’t met and you didn’t keep them in the loop.
Personas
As described in the brief, the user is a napkin sketch. Attach all personas and any notes about how they interact with one other. You should also attach a user matrix for each one, since it’s a useful design review tool.
KPI Measurements
By the time your brief is approved, the stakeholders will probably have key performance indicators (KPIs) ready to go. KPIs are a much more technical version of the expected behaviors list. They quantify behaviors as statistical data then correlate p-values with actual revenue. KPIs are downright scary if you let them sneak up on you.
What’s Next?
I don’t know, take a weekend off? This has been a lot of work.
When you get back, we’ll talk about how to launch a design sprint in an environment… somewhat less perfect than Google Ventures would have you facilitate. Put another way, I’d like to talk about running design sprints in real life where not everyone is on board with the idea.
The sprint will take your best research and unpack it for a team of designers. Because you’ve written a creative brief, it’ll be much more straightforward to run. By the end of the sprint, you’ll have a prototype ready for usability testing and a unified group of stakeholders supporting it. Usually.
Be sure to follow me on Medium and we’ll all meet back here in a few weeks for part 4 of this series on UX Process.
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At the time of this publication, I am a Principal UX Designer at Dell EMC’s Digital Marketing Studio in San Francisco. I learned HTML in 1997 and built my first commercial web experience in 1999. Professional designers and entrepreneurs can connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Leave a note when connecting on LinkedIn, especially if you have a weird title.
