Designing around design: 3 Approaches

You are foraging your path through the influx of materials that are slated to go out, checking off the boxes; export, send, approve. It can be challenging at times to stay on top of constantly knowing what happens after something has been sent, published, printed, released — all the more reason for designers today to be as diligent as possible in creating or maintaining a sense of feedback that makes sense for them and their team. For as much time that is poured into concept, design or customer journey mappings, it becomes meaningless if obfuscated by an intruding force or unknown anomaly. How do we as designers ensure we are approaching our work with proper sense and awareness?  Knowing how to communicate your design and the space you need in order to design well can make things easier.
 

Approach One: Create the right environment

Take A Holistic Approach - design + content must work in tandem
Although it can be easy for designers to be swept away in the creative process, it’s important to remember the team’s underlying goal, direction and timelines. Unfortunately, the way in which an audience perceives information can be wildly different that a designer’s original intention. Thus, just as in any relationship, listening and compromise between content and design become critical factors to keep momentum and avoid disappointment. Moreover, there is a level of responsibility in understanding required from both content and creative areas to reap a successful collaborative environment. More times than not it becomes the designer’s role to educate others on their process to be able to intelligently place content puzzle pieces into the larger picture and avoid an aesthetically pleasing jumble of words. Unless full context is revealed to all collaborators in a project, design and content cannot achieve harmony. Designers working in collaborative environments should strongly consider keeping an internal rule to require context knowledge and content foundation before what can quickly turn into a time consuming worm hole.
 

Approach Two: Make the daily grind easier

Encourage transparency - spare the hard feelings
Part of harnessing an appropriate level of internal feedback requires your colleagues to be open to relaying information to the right people. Additionally, cross departmental communication can be key in understanding a greater company need. It’s easy for designers to be labeled as a service role primed for graphic execution, but to get better results, people need to share audience or user feedback once the work has reached final output (if available). Sometimes this information is withheld unintentionally and it is important to let others know that feedback is healthy, welcome and appreciated. Feelings will not be damaged — this is what crits were built for in any design major — we collect and absorb feedback as a means to learn and improve. With valid feedback, we can make informed design decisions in the future. Designers with refined knowledge will know the difference between an off the cuff style remark and a true user concern or problem that needs addressing.  A good rule of thumb is to be ever curious — for photos of final output, information on click rates, site analytics, human reactions, tone of voice, level of engagement in conversations and interactions— all helpful in understanding and ultimately gauge impact at a general level.
 

Approach Three: Practice good design hygiene

Iterate, Test, Reflect, Grow - take UX into consideration
Recently, I came across an email I wanted to unsubscribe from after starting to notice I was receiving emails on the weekends from this particular retail company I never signed up for. The satisfaction of swiping to delete quickly can overshadow the unsubscribe action in the moment, but I searched toward the bottom of the email for the unsubscribe function which took what felt like two minutes, squinting my way through the small, light and cluttered misleading text until I could get to the unsubscribe landing page. Finally, I would be free of nuisance from this retailer. To my dismay, the text read:

[retailer logo] Do you wish to unsubscribe [my email address] from [retailer’s] Loyalty Rewards messages?

Under which displayed two CTA buttons of “Do Not Remove” and secondly “Remove”.
After selecting the “Remove” button, I was led to a page saying the action was unable to be completed. That was the end of my experience, and I had returned to my email, swiped the email to the trash and the fear of a future junk email from them crossed my mind. 

Too many red flags arose and I felt the urge to review the pain points that are worth reflecting on as a designer. Think about the user and apply changes accordingly. If someone takes the effort to unsubscribe from your campaign, give them a great experience of your brand even if they might not interested in that moment; don’t create a confusing landing page, instead brand the page with friendly content that encourages a potential to engage with your brand in the future. Use logical language to guide a user to path in the fastest and most pain-free manner; don’t use alternate terms and create an illogical order of CTA options — if someone is running towards an exit sign and opens the door only to find a button that reads ‘enter’ or ‘leave’ to then open the final exit door, you are creating a maze, leaving the person to feel trapped, confused or annoyed. Lastly, test your design all possible environments, browsers, etc. to avoid upsetting rejected actions. You cannot always foresee the bugs and this is sometimes the only way to improve, but at the very least, try to create a meaningful, thoughtful branded experience regardless of which place the user is falling into along the way.

Improving

Negative user experiences happen so frequently that it’s important to not only look out for them and observe your own experiences, but to strive to design experiences that people can walk out of feeling delighted. A simple notion of editing a sentence could make a significant difference in a customer touchpoint. At the end of the day, people do not like wasting time on pointless tasks or useless information. The foundation for positive outcomes hinges upon our collective effort to curate a sophisticated branded approach to relaying the most intriguing, important information in the most approachable fashion.