6ix Passions

How I Conceive Interactive Solutions

Following the suggestion Show ‘N Tell Friday by Jason, to post a project each Friday on what you are working on or have worked, I have decided to be more generalist and talk about how I design Web sites.

I always start each project by listening to my client needs by deliberately not looking at his current Web site or any of his competitors. I want from the start to think outside the box with less influence as possible. During the debrief I try to ask all the questions that come to my mind. I don’t really have a series of questions that I always ask, I just let them come as the conversation flow. For sure the common ones like: “If you had to describe your service/product in a single sentence what will it be?”, “If you had one thing to improve, what will it be?” and “Who are your audience(s)?” have to be covered in some way during the exercise.

I then take a break from my client and let him know I will brainstorm and do some research about his project and come back to him. It’s the perfect excuse to enter in what I call my “brain dumping” moment. No way I will keep in my head all those ideas that have poped-up during that meeting. I take my TextEdit.app or my iPhone Notes.app (while in transit) and write all the ideas I have, all the possible solutions, marketing or communications strategies, functionalities and killer features the future site may have. If I think of any references I also type them down. At the bottom of the text entry, I keep all the questions I will need clarification on (from my client or any of his internal or external sources). Only then I look at the current site of my client and do some benchmarking to find references to his competitors and also to all the ideas I had during my brain dumping session.

To narrow my focus, I try keep my solution around only three axis (three problems, challenges, desires, elements to communicate). I generally have a couple of concepts already in gestation in my head. For those concepts to take form I need to enter in brainstorm. You can hardly enter in brainstorm mode with yourself. Too much thinking hinders action, you need to share your ideas and bounce it with others. I like involving the art director/designer, the copy writer and the developer. I try to keep my team small. It has to enter into a taxi cab as I like to say (max 4 or 5 persons). Your best tool while bouncing ideas is to try to make them take form in an user experience: what the users will see, read and interact with, by sketching it.

I find that blackboards are the tool for the task for many reasons:

1. As they can be painted on any wall using a special type of paint, they are larger than any whiteboards or any piece of paper and become at the human scale level.
2. Because of their large size, everyone can see what you are drawing and participate by taking the chalk.
3. You cannot go into too much details and it’s forcing you, and anyone participating, to focus on what’s important.

You can find answers to most of your challenges by writing, in bullet points on the board, what you know about your client: his principal challenges, who are the audiences and what need to be accomplished by your interactive solution, and then by sketching how those can take form in a user interface. You can choose to illustrate the home page and/or any other important pages of your site. Again list the goal(s) of the page, each pieces of content that should be in it, in priorities, and draw the page until each aspects takes form. There are no good or bad ideas and you can conceived as many scenarios until you are satisfied (just make sure to take a picture of each for future reference - and maybe posterity). Once the concept is done and approved as the best solution by all the participants in the room, it’s time to share it with other persons in the company to get some feedback and eventually with your client.

There is no need to go further with your project if your client is not buying your concept. Sketches on blackboards are again the best alternative as your client will keep his attention on the concept and not the details of it. Questions about the details of the technical, visual or copy how-to can be answered verbally or later on. What is important is that the client understand how we try to solve his challenges and if he is in accordance with the concept. I suggest to invite your client over and to show them what you have drawn by explaining, standing and pointing to each aspects of your concept, why you think this is the best solution for his problem.

When I have the approval, I describe, in writing, the overall concept and layout the entire site architecture. I try to assess all the content, functionalities and any other user interaction elements in every sections and pages of the site. I find that if you can describe your solution in writing, you have a deeper understanding of all its aspects and their interactions.

The work can begins soon as the blackboards are accepted by the client and the site architecture is defined. The art director can begins to design the main pages/sections, the developer can begins to code some functionalities and the copy writer, the content in each page. When we need more details about some of the pages we didn’t do in sketching, we sit together again and layout what we think. I try to skip as much as possible the detail wireframes and functional specs in favor of simply drawing, describe, design, code, test and improve the solution.