Tag: Client

30 Nov

Design Shopping: Get A Faster Client Buy-In Through A Guided Design Showcase

by TBSCategories: News

Regardless of where you live, getting your driver’s license renewed or the address updated on your personal ID card may often be a painful chore. It’s such a frustrating experience that Disney’s Zootopia movie (IMDb) thought it best to represent DMV employees as sloths. Despite popular opinion, however, the California DMV (California Department of Motor Vehicles) is highly motivated to better serve the 30 million licensed drivers in California.

Better serving those citizens means improving a frustrating website experience — the primary way Californians access necessary services. That’s why the DMV Strike Team hired our design team at 10up to reimagine the entire California DMV website.

In the following case study, we’ll take a close look at a design exercise that we call internally Design Shopping. This exercise allows us to better communicate with the client and to more easily move our collaboration in the right direction.

Note: This article is geared more towards experienced UX/UI design teams working on some rather large projects.

Design Shopping?

Before we get to the finished product (the new DMV website), we have to start at the very beginning: understanding the client. As a government agency, they (therefore, we) had many stakeholders to juggle with varying motivations. This meant gaining client alignment during the discovery phase was our top priority.

While we don’t expect clients to be design-savvy — many find the concept of design confusing or intimidating — we need to get everyone on the same page. But how were we able to move the needle on design in a government works project?

We took them shopping. Design Shopping, that is.

Why “Design Shopping”?

When it comes to client services, first impressions are everything. Leaving a lasting impression, however, isn’t always easy, especially when working with a large and varied stakeholder group. To do so, let’s take a lesson from the great American poet, Maya Angelou:

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

— Maya Angelou

Cue the trumpets! From the very first to the very last interactions with our team, to leave a lasting impression on clients, we must make them feel good.

With these precious first moments in mind, our team experimented with various approaches to provide the DMV team a safe space to feel a connection and build rapport so everyone feels confident and comfortable sharing their ideas and opinions without judgment.

What we landed on is a concept that everyone simultaneously understands and immediately puts them at ease: shopping!

Shopping removes the pressure of being right or wrong — a layman immediately understands “picking and choosing” the right “fit.” Shopping also releases dopamine, which activates the brain’s reward and pleasure centers. This is important because it creates positive feelings while driving clients toward action.

Voilà — the birth of the Design Shopping exercise! Good feelings and design discussion equal nerd out!

Live look at design nerd-out! (Image source: ‘Mochimochi Land’ by Anna Hrachovec)

Yay! Now that we’ve set the tone, let’s get into the thick of this process: defining why and what we’re shopping for. This gives our team a much-needed opportunity to slow down and get inspired. In other words — get deep on the project. Our research and final set of artifacts are what frame the design conversation during the exercise.

To have a meaningful “I see you” moment with the DMV team, we needed to demonstrate to the stakeholder group that we were engaged and ready to translate their goals into tangible design results.

Swim In That Research

Ground your design thinking prior to visual exploration and workshop planning. Not all of these are required, but if it’s within your team’s control, have the following ready:

  • Identified project goals;
  • Problem statements;
  • Competitive analysis;
  • Mental model comparisons;
  • Historical context;
  • Project brief;
  • Preliminary UX discovery;
  • Content maps.

Sharing all the love for design. (Image source: ‘Mochimochi Land’ by Anna Hrachovec)

Go Deep

Make time for your brain to wander and get lost. When collecting artifacts for the design shopping exercise consider both sides of the coin: successful and unsuccessful examples that demonstrate what you’ve grocked from the research above.

Lead the conversation with ease by using the artifacts as a path and conversation trigger. Look for opportunities to point at:

  • Aesthetics or preferences;
  • Design understanding toward user experience;
  • Business goals;
  • Specific calls to action;
  • And how design can help support all of that beyond just looks.

This gives clients greater ownership of the design vision based on tangible benefits to their organization or user experience.

Tactical Inspiration

Don’t limit design inspiration to what you’re familiar with. Get weird! Here’s a brief list of where our team looks for inspiration:

Focus Your Artifacts

We’ve found that limiting the number of design shopping artifacts to 5-7 total, helps the team maintain focus and avoid fatigue. To narrow down the website artifacts, choose:

  • One in their vertical for familiarity and showcasing an understanding of fundamentals.
  • One outside the vertical that demonstrates or challenges brand attributes.
  • One that demonstrates challenging design choices (you think they’ll hate it).
  • One that demonstrates thoughtful design choices (you think they’ll love it).
  • Something they outlined in your research (ie. something the client has already pointed out) you want to dive deeper into.
  • One that’s reflective of the mental model of their audience (what you think will appeal to your understanding of their target).

Set Those Wheels In Motion

Choose Your Champions

Pump the breaks — before you jump into showing the client these sites, assign a facilitator. This champion will guide the group through the workshop, encourage participation, and help the group work toward outlined goals. Also assign an official notetaker to document the conversation to allow our facilitator(s) much appreciated space to focus on the participants.

With the DMV, we had an unusually large stakeholder group so we had two facilitators run the room. To achieve the same experience in a virtual setting, using multiple breakout rooms with more than one facilitator also works really well.

Workshop Materials

Next, gather your materials. Virtual or on-site, you should have:

  • Red and green color coding labels aka dot stickers;
  • Emoji stickers — these are a fun addition to the traditional red and green for votes;
  • Post-it notes for comments;
  • Screenshots of websites.

Here’s how it looks set up on a Miro board:

Stop, Collaborate And Listen

Whether your workshop is online or in-person, you must first set ground rules. Take the first 5-10 minutes of the workshop to break the ice — make sure the loudest stakeholders don’t control the entire conversation.

If driving a virtual workshop (the answer these days is a resounding YES), be sure to unblock technology paralysis. Confirm all systems are a go with a quick demo of how to use the tools you’ll be accessing during the workshop. This can take another 5-10 minutes.

If time is of the essence, send the virtual board ahead of time with some DIY instructions so workshop participants are more prepared to participate.

Then, set clear expectations and reiterate the purpose of the workshop.

Voting Parameters

Make sure to limit the number of votes each participant has. Whether these votes are virtual dots or real stickers, limit the amount of dots to 5 green and 5 red, for a total of 10 votes.

We’ve found that limiting the number of votes forces participants to be more deliberate when shopping, which leads to richer conversations and results. As a fun bonus, we provide a set of emojis for those emotionally charged shopping moments. This tends to get a lot of love from participants!

Ready, Set, Shop!

Once your client has all the tools, it’s time to shop shop shop! Set the timer for 15 minutes and invite participants to mingle while they vote on their favorite and least-favorite aspects of the designs before them. While they vote, ask pointed questions about the “whats” and “whys.”

We’ve found that standing while completing this exercise shifts the lens and puts participants on an even playing field. During this pandemic, we’ve explored options to add this experience to the virtual space and found that pre-filling the voting panels with avatars of the participants adds a nice human element and shifts the lens in much the same way as standing together does. Ghost cursors are just weird, am I right?

Guiding The Conversation

When the timer runs out, discuss the team’s shopping success. This is where you get to the heart of the shared language for the project. As you walk through each artifact, discuss patterns that start to emerge — both negative and positive.

We invite shoppers to volunteer. For example, say “I’m seeing a lot of green dots here. Let’s talk about why?”

Rather than singling out participants, this opens up to the room for discussion and evaluation. This is especially important when dealing with a large and varied stakeholder group like the DMV. This is a team effort and every step should feel collaborative.

The intent is to eliminate the pressure of a “correct answer.”

You want to hear the client’s design vocabulary and build upon that. Through this evaluation, you can begin to connect the dots and lead the team to foundational design principles and decisions you’ll be making throughout the following design phases.

Communicate Results

After everyone is done shopping, validate with the team what you’re seeing as a result of the exercise.

Outline all the areas where you have consensus, where you diverge, and note what the next steps look like.

We are not responsible for any impromptu dance moves from participants.

Once More, With Feeling

While we just outlined all the major ways you can run the design shopping workshop, this isn’t limited to a one-time exercise. We often have one final round of Design Shopping at another date.

This is where you take what was established in the first workshop and create.

Once in the middle of prototypes, moodboards, style tiles, and design principles — whatever you deem to be the best platform for expressing the design direction — you can use the Design Shopping exercise as a way to validate your own design solutions. If still stuck, throw in a Design Spectrum exercise to get really specific.

With a comfortable rapport already built and the client already familiar with the workshop, you can move past the initial aches of building a design vocabulary and move straight to evaluating and discussing the design.

Conclusion

The Design Shopping workflow allows you to move quickly toward a shared design vocabulary and foundational design principles in a deliberate, meaningful way. It’s like taking a road trip across California: you need to review your destinations and how you want to experience them before hitting the road.

As an industry, we are always talking about educating the client, but rarely structure that education in a way that’s not only painless but fun. Considering the amount of pressure the DMV team was under, the last thing our team wanted to do was add further stress, as further stress leads to poor outcomes for client relationships and of course, design.

The thing to remember is that the fun has a purpose — you’re gaining collective agreement for future communications to preemptively head off conflict. The visual nature of this workshop also adds value for stakeholders that may have missed the live session. When they refer back to the shopping exercise, it’s clear what direction to double down on and what to avoid.

In the end, Design Shopping is less about shopping for nice fonts or colors and more about showcasing the ROI (Return on Investment) of thoughtful design. It’s about creating a forum that allows creative possibilities to be discussed openly in an accessible way.

When done right, this exercise allows your client to see real potential because you showed them real examples where design has come to life. The abstract has now become concrete! With that foundation in place, you can look forward to creative innovation and confidence from your toughest critics: your clients.

Special Thanks

All the Kudos to Lea Alcantara (Visual Design Director at 10up), my design nerd out partner (who helps me craft useful workshops for our clients at 10up, including this one), and for the additional article tweaks and research done!

Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

30 Nov

Design Shopping: Get A Faster Client Buy-In Through A Guided Design Showcase

by TBSCategories: News

Regardless of where you live, getting your driver’s license renewed or the address updated on your personal ID card may often be a painful chore. It’s such a frustrating experience that Disney’s Zootopia movie (IMDb) thought it best to represent DMV employees as sloths. Despite popular opinion, however, the California DMV (California Department of Motor Vehicles) is highly motivated to better serve the 30 million licensed drivers in California.

Better serving those citizens means improving a frustrating website experience — the primary way Californians access necessary services. That’s why the DMV Strike Team hired our design team at 10up to reimagine the entire California DMV website.

In the following case study, we’ll take a close look at a design exercise that we call internally Design Shopping. This exercise allows us to better communicate with the client and to more easily move our collaboration in the right direction.

Note: This article is geared more towards experienced UX/UI design teams working on some rather large projects.

Design Shopping?

Before we get to the finished product (the new DMV website), we have to start at the very beginning: understanding the client. As a government agency, they (therefore, we) had many stakeholders to juggle with varying motivations. This meant gaining client alignment during the discovery phase was our top priority.

While we don’t expect clients to be design-savvy — many find the concept of design confusing or intimidating — we need to get everyone on the same page. But how were we able to move the needle on design in a government works project?

We took them shopping. Design Shopping, that is.

Why “Design Shopping”?

When it comes to client services, first impressions are everything. Leaving a lasting impression, however, isn’t always easy, especially when working with a large and varied stakeholder group. To do so, let’s take a lesson from the great American poet, Maya Angelou:

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

— Maya Angelou

Cue the trumpets! From the very first to the very last interactions with our team, to leave a lasting impression on clients, we must make them feel good.

With these precious first moments in mind, our team experimented with various approaches to provide the DMV team a safe space to feel a connection and build rapport so everyone feels confident and comfortable sharing their ideas and opinions without judgment.

What we landed on is a concept that everyone simultaneously understands and immediately puts them at ease: shopping!

Shopping removes the pressure of being right or wrong — a layman immediately understands “picking and choosing” the right “fit.” Shopping also releases dopamine, which activates the brain’s reward and pleasure centers. This is important because it creates positive feelings while driving clients toward action.

Voilà — the birth of the Design Shopping exercise! Good feelings and design discussion equal nerd out!

Live look at design nerd-out! (Image source: ‘Mochimochi Land’ by Anna Hrachovec)

Yay! Now that we’ve set the tone, let’s get into the thick of this process: defining why and what we’re shopping for. This gives our team a much-needed opportunity to slow down and get inspired. In other words — get deep on the project. Our research and final set of artifacts are what frame the design conversation during the exercise.

To have a meaningful “I see you” moment with the DMV team, we needed to demonstrate to the stakeholder group that we were engaged and ready to translate their goals into tangible design results.

Swim In That Research

Ground your design thinking prior to visual exploration and workshop planning. Not all of these are required, but if it’s within your team’s control, have the following ready:

  • Identified project goals;
  • Problem statements;
  • Competitive analysis;
  • Mental model comparisons;
  • Historical context;
  • Project brief;
  • Preliminary UX discovery;
  • Content maps.

Sharing all the love for design. (Image source: ‘Mochimochi Land’ by Anna Hrachovec)

Go Deep

Make time for your brain to wander and get lost. When collecting artifacts for the design shopping exercise consider both sides of the coin: successful and unsuccessful examples that demonstrate what you’ve grocked from the research above.

Lead the conversation with ease by using the artifacts as a path and conversation trigger. Look for opportunities to point at:

  • Aesthetics or preferences;
  • Design understanding toward user experience;
  • Business goals;
  • Specific calls to action;
  • And how design can help support all of that beyond just looks.

This gives clients greater ownership of the design vision based on tangible benefits to their organization or user experience.

Tactical Inspiration

Don’t limit design inspiration to what you’re familiar with. Get weird! Here’s a brief list of where our team looks for inspiration:

Focus Your Artifacts

We’ve found that limiting the number of design shopping artifacts to 5-7 total, helps the team maintain focus and avoid fatigue. To narrow down the website artifacts, choose:

  • One in their vertical for familiarity and showcasing an understanding of fundamentals.
  • One outside the vertical that demonstrates or challenges brand attributes.
  • One that demonstrates challenging design choices (you think they’ll hate it).
  • One that demonstrates thoughtful design choices (you think they’ll love it).
  • Something they outlined in your research (ie. something the client has already pointed out) you want to dive deeper into.
  • One that’s reflective of the mental model of their audience (what you think will appeal to your understanding of their target).

Set Those Wheels In Motion

Choose Your Champions

Pump the breaks — before you jump into showing the client these sites, assign a facilitator. This champion will guide the group through the workshop, encourage participation, and help the group work toward outlined goals. Also assign an official notetaker to document the conversation to allow our facilitator(s) much appreciated space to focus on the participants.

With the DMV, we had an unusually large stakeholder group so we had two facilitators run the room. To achieve the same experience in a virtual setting, using multiple breakout rooms with more than one facilitator also works really well.

Workshop Materials

Next, gather your materials. Virtual or on-site, you should have:

  • Red and green color coding labels aka dot stickers;
  • Emoji stickers — these are a fun addition to the traditional red and green for votes;
  • Post-it notes for comments;
  • Screenshots of websites.

Here’s how it looks set up on a Miro board:

Stop, Collaborate And Listen

Whether your workshop is online or in-person, you must first set ground rules. Take the first 5-10 minutes of the workshop to break the ice — make sure the loudest stakeholders don’t control the entire conversation.

If driving a virtual workshop (the answer these days is a resounding YES), be sure to unblock technology paralysis. Confirm all systems are a go with a quick demo of how to use the tools you’ll be accessing during the workshop. This can take another 5-10 minutes.

If time is of the essence, send the virtual board ahead of time with some DIY instructions so workshop participants are more prepared to participate.

Then, set clear expectations and reiterate the purpose of the workshop.

Voting Parameters

Make sure to limit the number of votes each participant has. Whether these votes are virtual dots or real stickers, limit the amount of dots to 5 green and 5 red, for a total of 10 votes.

We’ve found that limiting the number of votes forces participants to be more deliberate when shopping, which leads to richer conversations and results. As a fun bonus, we provide a set of emojis for those emotionally charged shopping moments. This tends to get a lot of love from participants!

Ready, Set, Shop!

Once your client has all the tools, it’s time to shop shop shop! Set the timer for 15 minutes and invite participants to mingle while they vote on their favorite and least-favorite aspects of the designs before them. While they vote, ask pointed questions about the “whats” and “whys.”

We’ve found that standing while completing this exercise shifts the lens and puts participants on an even playing field. During this pandemic, we’ve explored options to add this experience to the virtual space and found that pre-filling the voting panels with avatars of the participants adds a nice human element and shifts the lens in much the same way as standing together does. Ghost cursors are just weird, am I right?

Guiding The Conversation

When the timer runs out, discuss the team’s shopping success. This is where you get to the heart of the shared language for the project. As you walk through each artifact, discuss patterns that start to emerge — both negative and positive.

We invite shoppers to volunteer. For example, say “I’m seeing a lot of green dots here. Let’s talk about why?”

Rather than singling out participants, this opens up to the room for discussion and evaluation. This is especially important when dealing with a large and varied stakeholder group like the DMV. This is a team effort and every step should feel collaborative.

The intent is to eliminate the pressure of a “correct answer.”

You want to hear the client’s design vocabulary and build upon that. Through this evaluation, you can begin to connect the dots and lead the team to foundational design principles and decisions you’ll be making throughout the following design phases.

Communicate Results

After everyone is done shopping, validate with the team what you’re seeing as a result of the exercise.

Outline all the areas where you have consensus, where you diverge, and note what the next steps look like.

We are not responsible for any impromptu dance moves from participants.

Once More, With Feeling

While we just outlined all the major ways you can run the design shopping workshop, this isn’t limited to a one-time exercise. We often have one final round of Design Shopping at another date.

This is where you take what was established in the first workshop and create.

Once in the middle of prototypes, moodboards, style tiles, and design principles — whatever you deem to be the best platform for expressing the design direction — you can use the Design Shopping exercise as a way to validate your own design solutions. If still stuck, throw in a Design Spectrum exercise to get really specific.

With a comfortable rapport already built and the client already familiar with the workshop, you can move past the initial aches of building a design vocabulary and move straight to evaluating and discussing the design.

Conclusion

The Design Shopping workflow allows you to move quickly toward a shared design vocabulary and foundational design principles in a deliberate, meaningful way. It’s like taking a road trip across California: you need to review your destinations and how you want to experience them before hitting the road.

As an industry, we are always talking about educating the client, but rarely structure that education in a way that’s not only painless but fun. Considering the amount of pressure the DMV team was under, the last thing our team wanted to do was add further stress, as further stress leads to poor outcomes for client relationships and of course, design.

The thing to remember is that the fun has a purpose — you’re gaining collective agreement for future communications to preemptively head off conflict. The visual nature of this workshop also adds value for stakeholders that may have missed the live session. When they refer back to the shopping exercise, it’s clear what direction to double down on and what to avoid.

In the end, Design Shopping is less about shopping for nice fonts or colors and more about showcasing the ROI (Return on Investment) of thoughtful design. It’s about creating a forum that allows creative possibilities to be discussed openly in an accessible way.

When done right, this exercise allows your client to see real potential because you showed them real examples where design has come to life. The abstract has now become concrete! With that foundation in place, you can look forward to creative innovation and confidence from your toughest critics: your clients.

Special Thanks

All the Kudos to Lea Alcantara (Visual Design Director at 10up), my design nerd out partner (who helps me craft useful workshops for our clients at 10up, including this one), and for the additional article tweaks and research done!

Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

29 Nov

Design Shopping: Get A Faster Client Buy-In Through A Guided Design Showcase

by TBSCategories: News

Regardless of where you live, getting your driver’s license renewed or the address updated on your personal ID card may often be a painful chore. It’s such a frustrating experience that Disney’s Zootopia movie (IMDb) thought it best to represent DMV employees as sloths. Despite popular opinion, however, the California DMV (California Department of Motor Vehicles) is highly motivated to better serve the 30 million licensed drivers in California.

Better serving those citizens means improving a frustrating website experience — the primary way Californians access necessary services. That’s why the DMV Strike Team hired our design team at 10up to reimagine the entire California DMV website.

In the following case study, we’ll take a close look at a design exercise that we call internally Design Shopping. This exercise allows us to better communicate with the client and to more easily move our collaboration in the right direction.

Note: This article is geared more towards experienced UX/UI design teams working on some rather large projects.

Design Shopping?

Before we get to the finished product (the new DMV website), we have to start at the very beginning: understanding the client. As a government agency, they (therefore, we) had many stakeholders to juggle with varying motivations. This meant gaining client alignment during the discovery phase was our top priority.

While we don’t expect clients to be design-savvy — many find the concept of design confusing or intimidating — we need to get everyone on the same page. But how were we able to move the needle on design in a government works project?

We took them shopping. Design Shopping, that is.

Why “Design Shopping”?

When it comes to client services, first impressions are everything. Leaving a lasting impression, however, isn’t always easy, especially when working with a large and varied stakeholder group. To do so, let’s take a lesson from the great American poet, Maya Angelou:

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

— Maya Angelou

Cue the trumpets! From the very first to the very last interactions with our team, to leave a lasting impression on clients, we must make them feel good.

With these precious first moments in mind, our team experimented with various approaches to provide the DMV team a safe space to feel a connection and build rapport so everyone feels confident and comfortable sharing their ideas and opinions without judgment.

What we landed on is a concept that everyone simultaneously understands and immediately puts them at ease: shopping!

Shopping removes the pressure of being right or wrong — a layman immediately understands “picking and choosing” the right “fit.” Shopping also releases dopamine, which activates the brain’s reward and pleasure centers. This is important because it creates positive feelings while driving clients toward action.

Voilà — the birth of the Design Shopping exercise! Good feelings and design discussion equal nerd out!

Live look at design nerd-out! (Image source: ‘Mochimochi Land’ by Anna Hrachovec)

Yay! Now that we’ve set the tone, let’s get into the thick of this process: defining why and what we’re shopping for. This gives our team a much-needed opportunity to slow down and get inspired. In other words — get deep on the project. Our research and final set of artifacts are what frame the design conversation during the exercise.

To have a meaningful “I see you” moment with the DMV team, we needed to demonstrate to the stakeholder group that we were engaged and ready to translate their goals into tangible design results.

Swim In That Research

Ground your design thinking prior to visual exploration and workshop planning. Not all of these are required, but if it’s within your team’s control, have the following ready:

  • Identified project goals;
  • Problem statements;
  • Competitive analysis;
  • Mental model comparisons;
  • Historical context;
  • Project brief;
  • Preliminary UX discovery;
  • Content maps.

Sharing all the love for design. (Image source: ‘Mochimochi Land’ by Anna Hrachovec)

Go Deep

Make time for your brain to wander and get lost. When collecting artifacts for the design shopping exercise consider both sides of the coin: successful and unsuccessful examples that demonstrate what you’ve grocked from the research above.

Lead the conversation with ease by using the artifacts as a path and conversation trigger. Look for opportunities to point at:

  • Aesthetics or preferences;
  • Design understanding toward user experience;
  • Business goals;
  • Specific calls to action;
  • And how design can help support all of that beyond just looks.

This gives clients greater ownership of the design vision based on tangible benefits to their organization or user experience.

Tactical Inspiration

Don’t limit design inspiration to what you’re familiar with. Get weird! Here’s a brief list of where our team looks for inspiration:

Focus Your Artifacts

We’ve found that limiting the number of design shopping artifacts to 5-7 total, helps the team maintain focus and avoid fatigue. To narrow down the website artifacts, choose:

  • One in their vertical for familiarity and showcasing an understanding of fundamentals.
  • One outside the vertical that demonstrates or challenges brand attributes.
  • One that demonstrates challenging design choices (you think they’ll hate it).
  • One that demonstrates thoughtful design choices (you think they’ll love it).
  • Something they outlined in your research (ie. something the client has already pointed out) you want to dive deeper into.
  • One that’s reflective of the mental model of their audience (what you think will appeal to your understanding of their target).

Set Those Wheels In Motion

Choose Your Champions

Pump the breaks — before you jump into showing the client these sites, assign a facilitator. This champion will guide the group through the workshop, encourage participation, and help the group work toward outlined goals. Also assign an official notetaker to document the conversation to allow our facilitator(s) much appreciated space to focus on the participants.

With the DMV, we had an unusually large stakeholder group so we had two facilitators run the room. To achieve the same experience in a virtual setting, using multiple breakout rooms with more than one facilitator also works really well.

Workshop Materials

Next, gather your materials. Virtual or on-site, you should have:

  • Red and green color coding labels aka dot stickers;
  • Emoji stickers — these are a fun addition to the traditional red and green for votes;
  • Post-it notes for comments;
  • Screenshots of websites.

Here’s how it looks set up on a Miro board:

Stop, Collaborate And Listen

Whether your workshop is online or in-person, you must first set ground rules. Take the first 5-10 minutes of the workshop to break the ice — make sure the loudest stakeholders don’t control the entire conversation.

If driving a virtual workshop (the answer these days is a resounding YES), be sure to unblock technology paralysis. Confirm all systems are a go with a quick demo of how to use the tools you’ll be accessing during the workshop. This can take another 5-10 minutes.

If time is of the essence, send the virtual board ahead of time with some DIY instructions so workshop participants are more prepared to participate.

Then, set clear expectations and reiterate the purpose of the workshop.

Voting Parameters

Make sure to limit the number of votes each participant has. Whether these votes are virtual dots or real stickers, limit the amount of dots to 5 green and 5 red, for a total of 10 votes.

We’ve found that limiting the number of votes forces participants to be more deliberate when shopping, which leads to richer conversations and results. As a fun bonus, we provide a set of emojis for those emotionally charged shopping moments. This tends to get a lot of love from participants!

Ready, Set, Shop!

Once your client has all the tools, it’s time to shop shop shop! Set the timer for 15 minutes and invite participants to mingle while they vote on their favorite and least-favorite aspects of the designs before them. While they vote, ask pointed questions about the “whats” and “whys.”

We’ve found that standing while completing this exercise shifts the lens and puts participants on an even playing field. During this pandemic, we’ve explored options to add this experience to the virtual space and found that pre-filling the voting panels with avatars of the participants adds a nice human element and shifts the lens in much the same way as standing together does. Ghost cursors are just weird, am I right?

Guiding The Conversation

When the timer runs out, discuss the team’s shopping success. This is where you get to the heart of the shared language for the project. As you walk through each artifact, discuss patterns that start to emerge — both negative and positive.

We invite shoppers to volunteer. For example, say “I’m seeing a lot of green dots here. Let’s talk about why?”

Rather than singling out participants, this opens up to the room for discussion and evaluation. This is especially important when dealing with a large and varied stakeholder group like the DMV. This is a team effort and every step should feel collaborative.

The intent is to eliminate the pressure of a “correct answer.”

You want to hear the client’s design vocabulary and build upon that. Through this evaluation, you can begin to connect the dots and lead the team to foundational design principles and decisions you’ll be making throughout the following design phases.

Communicate Results

After everyone is done shopping, validate with the team what you’re seeing as a result of the exercise.

Outline all the areas where you have consensus, where you diverge, and note what the next steps look like.

We are not responsible for any impromptu dance moves from participants.

Once More, With Feeling

While we just outlined all the major ways you can run the design shopping workshop, this isn’t limited to a one-time exercise. We often have one final round of Design Shopping at another date.

This is where you take what was established in the first workshop and create.

Once in the middle of prototypes, moodboards, style tiles, and design principles — whatever you deem to be the best platform for expressing the design direction — you can use the Design Shopping exercise as a way to validate your own design solutions. If still stuck, throw in a Design Spectrum exercise to get really specific.

With a comfortable rapport already built and the client already familiar with the workshop, you can move past the initial aches of building a design vocabulary and move straight to evaluating and discussing the design.

Conclusion

The Design Shopping workflow allows you to move quickly toward a shared design vocabulary and foundational design principles in a deliberate, meaningful way. It’s like taking a road trip across California: you need to review your destinations and how you want to experience them before hitting the road.

As an industry, we are always talking about educating the client, but rarely structure that education in a way that’s not only painless but fun. Considering the amount of pressure the DMV team was under, the last thing our team wanted to do was add further stress, as further stress leads to poor outcomes for client relationships and of course, design.

The thing to remember is that the fun has a purpose — you’re gaining collective agreement for future communications to preemptively head off conflict. The visual nature of this workshop also adds value for stakeholders that may have missed the live session. When they refer back to the shopping exercise, it’s clear what direction to double down on and what to avoid.

In the end, Design Shopping is less about shopping for nice fonts or colors and more about showcasing the ROI (Return on Investment) of thoughtful design. It’s about creating a forum that allows creative possibilities to be discussed openly in an accessible way.

When done right, this exercise allows your client to see real potential because you showed them real examples where design has come to life. The abstract has now become concrete! With that foundation in place, you can look forward to creative innovation and confidence from your toughest critics: your clients.

Special Thanks

All the Kudos to Lea Alcantara (Visual Design Director at 10up), my design nerd out partner (who helps me craft useful workshops for our clients at 10up, including this one), and for the additional article tweaks and research done!

Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

29 Nov

Design Shopping: Get A Faster Client Buy-In Through A Guided Design Showcase

by TBSCategories: News

Regardless of where you live, getting your driver’s license renewed or the address updated on your personal ID card may often be a painful chore. It’s such a frustrating experience that Disney’s Zootopia movie (IMDb) thought it best to represent DMV employees as sloths. Despite popular opinion, however, the California DMV (California Department of Motor Vehicles) is highly motivated to better serve the 30 million licensed drivers in California.

Better serving those citizens means improving a frustrating website experience — the primary way Californians access necessary services. That’s why the DMV Strike Team hired our design team at 10up to reimagine the entire California DMV website.

In the following case study, we’ll take a close look at a design exercise that we call internally Design Shopping. This exercise allows us to better communicate with the client and to more easily move our collaboration in the right direction.

Note: This article is geared more towards experienced UX/UI design teams working on some rather large projects.

Design Shopping?

Before we get to the finished product (the new DMV website), we have to start at the very beginning: understanding the client. As a government agency, they (therefore, we) had many stakeholders to juggle with varying motivations. This meant gaining client alignment during the discovery phase was our top priority.

While we don’t expect clients to be design-savvy — many find the concept of design confusing or intimidating — we need to get everyone on the same page. But how were we able to move the needle on design in a government works project?

We took them shopping. Design Shopping, that is.

Why “Design Shopping”?

When it comes to client services, first impressions are everything. Leaving a lasting impression, however, isn’t always easy, especially when working with a large and varied stakeholder group. To do so, let’s take a lesson from the great American poet, Maya Angelou:

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

— Maya Angelou

Cue the trumpets! From the very first to the very last interactions with our team, to leave a lasting impression on clients, we must make them feel good.

With these precious first moments in mind, our team experimented with various approaches to provide the DMV team a safe space to feel a connection and build rapport so everyone feels confident and comfortable sharing their ideas and opinions without judgment.

What we landed on is a concept that everyone simultaneously understands and immediately puts them at ease: shopping!

Shopping removes the pressure of being right or wrong — a layman immediately understands “picking and choosing” the right “fit.” Shopping also releases dopamine, which activates the brain’s reward and pleasure centers. This is important because it creates positive feelings while driving clients toward action.

Voilà — the birth of the Design Shopping exercise! Good feelings and design discussion equal nerd out!

Live look at design nerd-out! (Image source: ‘Mochimochi Land’ by Anna Hrachovec)

Yay! Now that we’ve set the tone, let’s get into the thick of this process: defining why and what we’re shopping for. This gives our team a much-needed opportunity to slow down and get inspired. In other words — get deep on the project. Our research and final set of artifacts are what frame the design conversation during the exercise.

To have a meaningful “I see you” moment with the DMV team, we needed to demonstrate to the stakeholder group that we were engaged and ready to translate their goals into tangible design results.

Swim In That Research

Ground your design thinking prior to visual exploration and workshop planning. Not all of these are required, but if it’s within your team’s control, have the following ready:

  • Identified project goals;
  • Problem statements;
  • Competitive analysis;
  • Mental model comparisons;
  • Historical context;
  • Project brief;
  • Preliminary UX discovery;
  • Content maps.

Sharing all the love for design. (Image source: ‘Mochimochi Land’ by Anna Hrachovec)

Go Deep

Make time for your brain to wander and get lost. When collecting artifacts for the design shopping exercise consider both sides of the coin: successful and unsuccessful examples that demonstrate what you’ve grocked from the research above.

Lead the conversation with ease by using the artifacts as a path and conversation trigger. Look for opportunities to point at:

  • Aesthetics or preferences;
  • Design understanding toward user experience;
  • Business goals;
  • Specific calls to action;
  • And how design can help support all of that beyond just looks.

This gives clients greater ownership of the design vision based on tangible benefits to their organization or user experience.

Tactical Inspiration

Don’t limit design inspiration to what you’re familiar with. Get weird! Here’s a brief list of where our team looks for inspiration:

Focus Your Artifacts

We’ve found that limiting the number of design shopping artifacts to 5-7 total, helps the team maintain focus and avoid fatigue. To narrow down the website artifacts, choose:

  • One in their vertical for familiarity and showcasing an understanding of fundamentals.
  • One outside the vertical that demonstrates or challenges brand attributes.
  • One that demonstrates challenging design choices (you think they’ll hate it).
  • One that demonstrates thoughtful design choices (you think they’ll love it).
  • Something they outlined in your research (ie. something the client has already pointed out) you want to dive deeper into.
  • One that’s reflective of the mental model of their audience (what you think will appeal to your understanding of their target).

Set Those Wheels In Motion

Choose Your Champions

Pump the breaks — before you jump into showing the client these sites, assign a facilitator. This champion will guide the group through the workshop, encourage participation, and help the group work toward outlined goals. Also assign an official notetaker to document the conversation to allow our facilitator(s) much appreciated space to focus on the participants.

With the DMV, we had an unusually large stakeholder group so we had two facilitators run the room. To achieve the same experience in a virtual setting, using multiple breakout rooms with more than one facilitator also works really well.

Workshop Materials

Next, gather your materials. Virtual or on-site, you should have:

  • Red and green color coding labels aka dot stickers;
  • Emoji stickers — these are a fun addition to the traditional red and green for votes;
  • Post-it notes for comments;
  • Screenshots of websites.

Here’s how it looks set up on a Miro board:

Stop, Collaborate And Listen

Whether your workshop is online or in-person, you must first set ground rules. Take the first 5-10 minutes of the workshop to break the ice — make sure the loudest stakeholders don’t control the entire conversation.

If driving a virtual workshop (the answer these days is a resounding YES), be sure to unblock technology paralysis. Confirm all systems are a go with a quick demo of how to use the tools you’ll be accessing during the workshop. This can take another 5-10 minutes.

If time is of the essence, send the virtual board ahead of time with some DIY instructions so workshop participants are more prepared to participate.

Then, set clear expectations and reiterate the purpose of the workshop.

Voting Parameters

Make sure to limit the number of votes each participant has. Whether these votes are virtual dots or real stickers, limit the amount of dots to 5 green and 5 red, for a total of 10 votes.

We’ve found that limiting the number of votes forces participants to be more deliberate when shopping, which leads to richer conversations and results. As a fun bonus, we provide a set of emojis for those emotionally charged shopping moments. This tends to get a lot of love from participants!

Ready, Set, Shop!

Once your client has all the tools, it’s time to shop shop shop! Set the timer for 15 minutes and invite participants to mingle while they vote on their favorite and least-favorite aspects of the designs before them. While they vote, ask pointed questions about the “whats” and “whys.”

We’ve found that standing while completing this exercise shifts the lens and puts participants on an even playing field. During this pandemic, we’ve explored options to add this experience to the virtual space and found that pre-filling the voting panels with avatars of the participants adds a nice human element and shifts the lens in much the same way as standing together does. Ghost cursors are just weird, am I right?

Guiding The Conversation

When the timer runs out, discuss the team’s shopping success. This is where you get to the heart of the shared language for the project. As you walk through each artifact, discuss patterns that start to emerge — both negative and positive.

We invite shoppers to volunteer. For example, say “I’m seeing a lot of green dots here. Let’s talk about why?”

Rather than singling out participants, this opens up to the room for discussion and evaluation. This is especially important when dealing with a large and varied stakeholder group like the DMV. This is a team effort and every step should feel collaborative.

The intent is to eliminate the pressure of a “correct answer.”

You want to hear the client’s design vocabulary and build upon that. Through this evaluation, you can begin to connect the dots and lead the team to foundational design principles and decisions you’ll be making throughout the following design phases.

Communicate Results

After everyone is done shopping, validate with the team what you’re seeing as a result of the exercise.

Outline all the areas where you have consensus, where you diverge, and note what the next steps look like.

We are not responsible for any impromptu dance moves from participants.

Once More, With Feeling

While we just outlined all the major ways you can run the design shopping workshop, this isn’t limited to a one-time exercise. We often have one final round of Design Shopping at another date.

This is where you take what was established in the first workshop and create.

Once in the middle of prototypes, moodboards, style tiles, and design principles — whatever you deem to be the best platform for expressing the design direction — you can use the Design Shopping exercise as a way to validate your own design solutions. If still stuck, throw in a Design Spectrum exercise to get really specific.

With a comfortable rapport already built and the client already familiar with the workshop, you can move past the initial aches of building a design vocabulary and move straight to evaluating and discussing the design.

Conclusion

The Design Shopping workflow allows you to move quickly toward a shared design vocabulary and foundational design principles in a deliberate, meaningful way. It’s like taking a road trip across California: you need to review your destinations and how you want to experience them before hitting the road.

As an industry, we are always talking about educating the client, but rarely structure that education in a way that’s not only painless but fun. Considering the amount of pressure the DMV team was under, the last thing our team wanted to do was add further stress, as further stress leads to poor outcomes for client relationships and of course, design.

The thing to remember is that the fun has a purpose — you’re gaining collective agreement for future communications to preemptively head off conflict. The visual nature of this workshop also adds value for stakeholders that may have missed the live session. When they refer back to the shopping exercise, it’s clear what direction to double down on and what to avoid.

In the end, Design Shopping is less about shopping for nice fonts or colors and more about showcasing the ROI (Return on Investment) of thoughtful design. It’s about creating a forum that allows creative possibilities to be discussed openly in an accessible way.

When done right, this exercise allows your client to see real potential because you showed them real examples where design has come to life. The abstract has now become concrete! With that foundation in place, you can look forward to creative innovation and confidence from your toughest critics: your clients.

Special Thanks

All the Kudos to Lea Alcantara (Visual Design Director at 10up), my design nerd out partner (who helps me craft useful workshops for our clients at 10up, including this one), and for the additional article tweaks and research done!

Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

29 Nov

Design Shopping: Get A Faster Client Buy-In Through A Guided Design Showcase

by TBSCategories: News

Regardless of where you live, getting your driver’s license renewed or the address updated on your personal ID card may often be a painful chore. It’s such a frustrating experience that Disney’s Zootopia movie (IMDb) thought it best to represent DMV employees as sloths. Despite popular opinion, however, the California DMV (California Department of Motor Vehicles) is highly motivated to better serve the 30 million licensed drivers in California.

Better serving those citizens means improving a frustrating website experience — the primary way Californians access necessary services. That’s why the DMV Strike Team hired our design team at 10up to reimagine the entire California DMV website.

In the following case study, we’ll take a close look at a design exercise that we call internally Design Shopping. This exercise allows us to better communicate with the client and to more easily move our collaboration in the right direction.

Note: This article is geared more towards experienced UX/UI design teams working on some rather large projects.

Design Shopping?

Before we get to the finished product (the new DMV website), we have to start at the very beginning: understanding the client. As a government agency, they (therefore, we) had many stakeholders to juggle with varying motivations. This meant gaining client alignment during the discovery phase was our top priority.

While we don’t expect clients to be design-savvy — many find the concept of design confusing or intimidating — we need to get everyone on the same page. But how were we able to move the needle on design in a government works project?

We took them shopping. Design Shopping, that is.

Why “Design Shopping”?

When it comes to client services, first impressions are everything. Leaving a lasting impression, however, isn’t always easy, especially when working with a large and varied stakeholder group. To do so, let’s take a lesson from the great American poet, Maya Angelou:

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

— Maya Angelou

Cue the trumpets! From the very first to the very last interactions with our team, to leave a lasting impression on clients, we must make them feel good.

With these precious first moments in mind, our team experimented with various approaches to provide the DMV team a safe space to feel a connection and build rapport so everyone feels confident and comfortable sharing their ideas and opinions without judgment.

What we landed on is a concept that everyone simultaneously understands and immediately puts them at ease: shopping!

Shopping removes the pressure of being right or wrong — a layman immediately understands “picking and choosing” the right “fit.” Shopping also releases dopamine, which activates the brain’s reward and pleasure centers. This is important because it creates positive feelings while driving clients toward action.

Voilà — the birth of the Design Shopping exercise! Good feelings and design discussion equal nerd out!

Live look at design nerd-out! (Image source: ‘Mochimochi Land’ by Anna Hrachovec)

Yay! Now that we’ve set the tone, let’s get into the thick of this process: defining why and what we’re shopping for. This gives our team a much-needed opportunity to slow down and get inspired. In other words — get deep on the project. Our research and final set of artifacts are what frame the design conversation during the exercise.

To have a meaningful “I see you” moment with the DMV team, we needed to demonstrate to the stakeholder group that we were engaged and ready to translate their goals into tangible design results.

Swim In That Research

Ground your design thinking prior to visual exploration and workshop planning. Not all of these are required, but if it’s within your team’s control, have the following ready:

  • Identified project goals;
  • Problem statements;
  • Competitive analysis;
  • Mental model comparisons;
  • Historical context;
  • Project brief;
  • Preliminary UX discovery;
  • Content maps.

Sharing all the love for design. (Image source: ‘Mochimochi Land’ by Anna Hrachovec)

Go Deep

Make time for your brain to wander and get lost. When collecting artifacts for the design shopping exercise consider both sides of the coin: successful and unsuccessful examples that demonstrate what you’ve grocked from the research above.

Lead the conversation with ease by using the artifacts as a path and conversation trigger. Look for opportunities to point at:

  • Aesthetics or preferences;
  • Design understanding toward user experience;
  • Business goals;
  • Specific calls to action;
  • And how design can help support all of that beyond just looks.

This gives clients greater ownership of the design vision based on tangible benefits to their organization or user experience.

Tactical Inspiration

Don’t limit design inspiration to what you’re familiar with. Get weird! Here’s a brief list of where our team looks for inspiration:

Focus Your Artifacts

We’ve found that limiting the number of design shopping artifacts to 5-7 total, helps the team maintain focus and avoid fatigue. To narrow down the website artifacts, choose:

  • One in their vertical for familiarity and showcasing an understanding of fundamentals.
  • One outside the vertical that demonstrates or challenges brand attributes.
  • One that demonstrates challenging design choices (you think they’ll hate it).
  • One that demonstrates thoughtful design choices (you think they’ll love it).
  • Something they outlined in your research (ie. something the client has already pointed out) you want to dive deeper into.
  • One that’s reflective of the mental model of their audience (what you think will appeal to your understanding of their target).

Set Those Wheels In Motion

Choose Your Champions

Pump the breaks — before you jump into showing the client these sites, assign a facilitator. This champion will guide the group through the workshop, encourage participation, and help the group work toward outlined goals. Also assign an official notetaker to document the conversation to allow our facilitator(s) much appreciated space to focus on the participants.

With the DMV, we had an unusually large stakeholder group so we had two facilitators run the room. To achieve the same experience in a virtual setting, using multiple breakout rooms with more than one facilitator also works really well.

Workshop Materials

Next, gather your materials. Virtual or on-site, you should have:

  • Red and green color coding labels aka dot stickers;
  • Emoji stickers — these are a fun addition to the traditional red and green for votes;
  • Post-it notes for comments;
  • Screenshots of websites.

Here’s how it looks set up on a Miro board:

Stop, Collaborate And Listen

Whether your workshop is online or in-person, you must first set ground rules. Take the first 5-10 minutes of the workshop to break the ice — make sure the loudest stakeholders don’t control the entire conversation.

If driving a virtual workshop (the answer these days is a resounding YES), be sure to unblock technology paralysis. Confirm all systems are a go with a quick demo of how to use the tools you’ll be accessing during the workshop. This can take another 5-10 minutes.

If time is of the essence, send the virtual board ahead of time with some DIY instructions so workshop participants are more prepared to participate.

Then, set clear expectations and reiterate the purpose of the workshop.

Voting Parameters

Make sure to limit the number of votes each participant has. Whether these votes are virtual dots or real stickers, limit the amount of dots to 5 green and 5 red, for a total of 10 votes.

We’ve found that limiting the number of votes forces participants to be more deliberate when shopping, which leads to richer conversations and results. As a fun bonus, we provide a set of emojis for those emotionally charged shopping moments. This tends to get a lot of love from participants!

Ready, Set, Shop!

Once your client has all the tools, it’s time to shop shop shop! Set the timer for 15 minutes and invite participants to mingle while they vote on their favorite and least-favorite aspects of the designs before them. While they vote, ask pointed questions about the “whats” and “whys.”

We’ve found that standing while completing this exercise shifts the lens and puts participants on an even playing field. During this pandemic, we’ve explored options to add this experience to the virtual space and found that pre-filling the voting panels with avatars of the participants adds a nice human element and shifts the lens in much the same way as standing together does. Ghost cursors are just weird, am I right?

Guiding The Conversation

When the timer runs out, discuss the team’s shopping success. This is where you get to the heart of the shared language for the project. As you walk through each artifact, discuss patterns that start to emerge — both negative and positive.

We invite shoppers to volunteer. For example, say “I’m seeing a lot of green dots here. Let’s talk about why?”

Rather than singling out participants, this opens up to the room for discussion and evaluation. This is especially important when dealing with a large and varied stakeholder group like the DMV. This is a team effort and every step should feel collaborative.

The intent is to eliminate the pressure of a “correct answer.”

You want to hear the client’s design vocabulary and build upon that. Through this evaluation, you can begin to connect the dots and lead the team to foundational design principles and decisions you’ll be making throughout the following design phases.

Communicate Results

After everyone is done shopping, validate with the team what you’re seeing as a result of the exercise.

Outline all the areas where you have consensus, where you diverge, and note what the next steps look like.

We are not responsible for any impromptu dance moves from participants.

Once More, With Feeling

While we just outlined all the major ways you can run the design shopping workshop, this isn’t limited to a one-time exercise. We often have one final round of Design Shopping at another date.

This is where you take what was established in the first workshop and create.

Once in the middle of prototypes, moodboards, style tiles, and design principles — whatever you deem to be the best platform for expressing the design direction — you can use the Design Shopping exercise as a way to validate your own design solutions. If still stuck, throw in a Design Spectrum exercise to get really specific.

With a comfortable rapport already built and the client already familiar with the workshop, you can move past the initial aches of building a design vocabulary and move straight to evaluating and discussing the design.

Conclusion

The Design Shopping workflow allows you to move quickly toward a shared design vocabulary and foundational design principles in a deliberate, meaningful way. It’s like taking a road trip across California: you need to review your destinations and how you want to experience them before hitting the road.

As an industry, we are always talking about educating the client, but rarely structure that education in a way that’s not only painless but fun. Considering the amount of pressure the DMV team was under, the last thing our team wanted to do was add further stress, as further stress leads to poor outcomes for client relationships and of course, design.

The thing to remember is that the fun has a purpose — you’re gaining collective agreement for future communications to preemptively head off conflict. The visual nature of this workshop also adds value for stakeholders that may have missed the live session. When they refer back to the shopping exercise, it’s clear what direction to double down on and what to avoid.

In the end, Design Shopping is less about shopping for nice fonts or colors and more about showcasing the ROI (Return on Investment) of thoughtful design. It’s about creating a forum that allows creative possibilities to be discussed openly in an accessible way.

When done right, this exercise allows your client to see real potential because you showed them real examples where design has come to life. The abstract has now become concrete! With that foundation in place, you can look forward to creative innovation and confidence from your toughest critics: your clients.

Special Thanks

All the Kudos to Lea Alcantara (Visual Design Director at 10up), my design nerd out partner (who helps me craft useful workshops for our clients at 10up, including this one), and for the additional article tweaks and research done!

Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

28 Nov

Design Shopping: Get A Faster Client Buy-In Through A Guided Design Showcase

by TBSCategories: News

Regardless of where you live, getting your driver’s license renewed or the address updated on your personal ID card may often be a painful chore. It’s such a frustrating experience that Disney’s Zootopia movie (IMDb) thought it best to represent DMV employees as sloths. Despite popular opinion, however, the California DMV (California Department of Motor Vehicles) is highly motivated to better serve the 30 million licensed drivers in California.

Better serving those citizens means improving a frustrating website experience — the primary way Californians access necessary services. That’s why the DMV Strike Team hired our design team at 10up to reimagine the entire California DMV website.

In the following case study, we’ll take a close look at a design exercise that we call internally Design Shopping. This exercise allows us to better communicate with the client and to more easily move our collaboration in the right direction.

Note: This article is geared more towards experienced UX/UI design teams working on some rather large projects.

Design Shopping?

Before we get to the finished product (the new DMV website), we have to start at the very beginning: understanding the client. As a government agency, they (therefore, we) had many stakeholders to juggle with varying motivations. This meant gaining client alignment during the discovery phase was our top priority.

While we don’t expect clients to be design-savvy — many find the concept of design confusing or intimidating — we need to get everyone on the same page. But how were we able to move the needle on design in a government works project?

We took them shopping. Design Shopping, that is.

Why “Design Shopping”?

When it comes to client services, first impressions are everything. Leaving a lasting impression, however, isn’t always easy, especially when working with a large and varied stakeholder group. To do so, let’s take a lesson from the great American poet, Maya Angelou:

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

— Maya Angelou

Cue the trumpets! From the very first to the very last interactions with our team, to leave a lasting impression on clients, we must make them feel good.

With these precious first moments in mind, our team experimented with various approaches to provide the DMV team a safe space to feel a connection and build rapport so everyone feels confident and comfortable sharing their ideas and opinions without judgment.

What we landed on is a concept that everyone simultaneously understands and immediately puts them at ease: shopping!

Shopping removes the pressure of being right or wrong — a layman immediately understands “picking and choosing” the right “fit.” Shopping also releases dopamine, which activates the brain’s reward and pleasure centers. This is important because it creates positive feelings while driving clients toward action.

Voilà — the birth of the Design Shopping exercise! Good feelings and design discussion equal nerd out!

Live look at design nerd-out! (Image source: ‘Mochimochi Land’ by Anna Hrachovec)

Yay! Now that we’ve set the tone, let’s get into the thick of this process: defining why and what we’re shopping for. This gives our team a much-needed opportunity to slow down and get inspired. In other words — get deep on the project. Our research and final set of artifacts are what frame the design conversation during the exercise.

To have a meaningful “I see you” moment with the DMV team, we needed to demonstrate to the stakeholder group that we were engaged and ready to translate their goals into tangible design results.

Swim In That Research

Ground your design thinking prior to visual exploration and workshop planning. Not all of these are required, but if it’s within your team’s control, have the following ready:

  • Identified project goals;
  • Problem statements;
  • Competitive analysis;
  • Mental model comparisons;
  • Historical context;
  • Project brief;
  • Preliminary UX discovery;
  • Content maps.

Sharing all the love for design. (Image source: ‘Mochimochi Land’ by Anna Hrachovec)

Go Deep

Make time for your brain to wander and get lost. When collecting artifacts for the design shopping exercise consider both sides of the coin: successful and unsuccessful examples that demonstrate what you’ve grocked from the research above.

Lead the conversation with ease by using the artifacts as a path and conversation trigger. Look for opportunities to point at:

  • Aesthetics or preferences;
  • Design understanding toward user experience;
  • Business goals;
  • Specific calls to action;
  • And how design can help support all of that beyond just looks.

This gives clients greater ownership of the design vision based on tangible benefits to their organization or user experience.

Tactical Inspiration

Don’t limit design inspiration to what you’re familiar with. Get weird! Here’s a brief list of where our team looks for inspiration:

Focus Your Artifacts

We’ve found that limiting the number of design shopping artifacts to 5-7 total, helps the team maintain focus and avoid fatigue. To narrow down the website artifacts, choose:

  • One in their vertical for familiarity and showcasing an understanding of fundamentals.
  • One outside the vertical that demonstrates or challenges brand attributes.
  • One that demonstrates challenging design choices (you think they’ll hate it).
  • One that demonstrates thoughtful design choices (you think they’ll love it).
  • Something they outlined in your research (ie. something the client has already pointed out) you want to dive deeper into.
  • One that’s reflective of the mental model of their audience (what you think will appeal to your understanding of their target).

Set Those Wheels In Motion

Choose Your Champions

Pump the breaks — before you jump into showing the client these sites, assign a facilitator. This champion will guide the group through the workshop, encourage participation, and help the group work toward outlined goals. Also assign an official notetaker to document the conversation to allow our facilitator(s) much appreciated space to focus on the participants.

With the DMV, we had an unusually large stakeholder group so we had two facilitators run the room. To achieve the same experience in a virtual setting, using multiple breakout rooms with more than one facilitator also works really well.

Workshop Materials

Next, gather your materials. Virtual or on-site, you should have:

  • Red and green color coding labels aka dot stickers;
  • Emoji stickers — these are a fun addition to the traditional red and green for votes;
  • Post-it notes for comments;
  • Screenshots of websites.

Here’s how it looks set up on a Miro board:

Stop, Collaborate And Listen

Whether your workshop is online or in-person, you must first set ground rules. Take the first 5-10 minutes of the workshop to break the ice — make sure the loudest stakeholders don’t control the entire conversation.

If driving a virtual workshop (the answer these days is a resounding YES), be sure to unblock technology paralysis. Confirm all systems are a go with a quick demo of how to use the tools you’ll be accessing during the workshop. This can take another 5-10 minutes.

If time is of the essence, send the virtual board ahead of time with some DIY instructions so workshop participants are more prepared to participate.

Then, set clear expectations and reiterate the purpose of the workshop.

Voting Parameters

Make sure to limit the number of votes each participant has. Whether these votes are virtual dots or real stickers, limit the amount of dots to 5 green and 5 red, for a total of 10 votes.

We’ve found that limiting the number of votes forces participants to be more deliberate when shopping, which leads to richer conversations and results. As a fun bonus, we provide a set of emojis for those emotionally charged shopping moments. This tends to get a lot of love from participants!

Ready, Set, Shop!

Once your client has all the tools, it’s time to shop shop shop! Set the timer for 15 minutes and invite participants to mingle while they vote on their favorite and least-favorite aspects of the designs before them. While they vote, ask pointed questions about the “whats” and “whys.”

We’ve found that standing while completing this exercise shifts the lens and puts participants on an even playing field. During this pandemic, we’ve explored options to add this experience to the virtual space and found that pre-filling the voting panels with avatars of the participants adds a nice human element and shifts the lens in much the same way as standing together does. Ghost cursors are just weird, am I right?

Guiding The Conversation

When the timer runs out, discuss the team’s shopping success. This is where you get to the heart of the shared language for the project. As you walk through each artifact, discuss patterns that start to emerge — both negative and positive.

We invite shoppers to volunteer. For example, say “I’m seeing a lot of green dots here. Let’s talk about why?”

Rather than singling out participants, this opens up to the room for discussion and evaluation. This is especially important when dealing with a large and varied stakeholder group like the DMV. This is a team effort and every step should feel collaborative.

The intent is to eliminate the pressure of a “correct answer.”

You want to hear the client’s design vocabulary and build upon that. Through this evaluation, you can begin to connect the dots and lead the team to foundational design principles and decisions you’ll be making throughout the following design phases.

Communicate Results

After everyone is done shopping, validate with the team what you’re seeing as a result of the exercise.

Outline all the areas where you have consensus, where you diverge, and note what the next steps look like.

We are not responsible for any impromptu dance moves from participants.

Once More, With Feeling

While we just outlined all the major ways you can run the design shopping workshop, this isn’t limited to a one-time exercise. We often have one final round of Design Shopping at another date.

This is where you take what was established in the first workshop and create.

Once in the middle of prototypes, moodboards, style tiles, and design principles — whatever you deem to be the best platform for expressing the design direction — you can use the Design Shopping exercise as a way to validate your own design solutions. If still stuck, throw in a Design Spectrum exercise to get really specific.

With a comfortable rapport already built and the client already familiar with the workshop, you can move past the initial aches of building a design vocabulary and move straight to evaluating and discussing the design.

Conclusion

The Design Shopping workflow allows you to move quickly toward a shared design vocabulary and foundational design principles in a deliberate, meaningful way. It’s like taking a road trip across California: you need to review your destinations and how you want to experience them before hitting the road.

As an industry, we are always talking about educating the client, but rarely structure that education in a way that’s not only painless but fun. Considering the amount of pressure the DMV team was under, the last thing our team wanted to do was add further stress, as further stress leads to poor outcomes for client relationships and of course, design.

The thing to remember is that the fun has a purpose — you’re gaining collective agreement for future communications to preemptively head off conflict. The visual nature of this workshop also adds value for stakeholders that may have missed the live session. When they refer back to the shopping exercise, it’s clear what direction to double down on and what to avoid.

In the end, Design Shopping is less about shopping for nice fonts or colors and more about showcasing the ROI (Return on Investment) of thoughtful design. It’s about creating a forum that allows creative possibilities to be discussed openly in an accessible way.

When done right, this exercise allows your client to see real potential because you showed them real examples where design has come to life. The abstract has now become concrete! With that foundation in place, you can look forward to creative innovation and confidence from your toughest critics: your clients.

Special Thanks

All the Kudos to Lea Alcantara (Visual Design Director at 10up), my design nerd out partner (who helps me craft useful workshops for our clients at 10up, including this one), and for the additional article tweaks and research done!

Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

28 Nov

Design Shopping: Get A Faster Client Buy-In Through A Guided Design Showcase

by TBSCategories: News

Regardless of where you live, getting your driver’s license renewed or the address updated on your personal ID card may often be a painful chore. It’s such a frustrating experience that Disney’s Zootopia movie (IMDb) thought it best to represent DMV employees as sloths. Despite popular opinion, however, the California DMV (California Department of Motor Vehicles) is highly motivated to better serve the 30 million licensed drivers in California.

Better serving those citizens means improving a frustrating website experience — the primary way Californians access necessary services. That’s why the DMV Strike Team hired our design team at 10up to reimagine the entire California DMV website.

In the following case study, we’ll take a close look at a design exercise that we call internally Design Shopping. This exercise allows us to better communicate with the client and to more easily move our collaboration in the right direction.

Note: This article is geared more towards experienced UX/UI design teams working on some rather large projects.

Design Shopping?

Before we get to the finished product (the new DMV website), we have to start at the very beginning: understanding the client. As a government agency, they (therefore, we) had many stakeholders to juggle with varying motivations. This meant gaining client alignment during the discovery phase was our top priority.

While we don’t expect clients to be design-savvy — many find the concept of design confusing or intimidating — we need to get everyone on the same page. But how were we able to move the needle on design in a government works project?

We took them shopping. Design Shopping, that is.

Why “Design Shopping”?

When it comes to client services, first impressions are everything. Leaving a lasting impression, however, isn’t always easy, especially when working with a large and varied stakeholder group. To do so, let’s take a lesson from the great American poet, Maya Angelou:

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

— Maya Angelou

Cue the trumpets! From the very first to the very last interactions with our team, to leave a lasting impression on clients, we must make them feel good.

With these precious first moments in mind, our team experimented with various approaches to provide the DMV team a safe space to feel a connection and build rapport so everyone feels confident and comfortable sharing their ideas and opinions without judgment.

What we landed on is a concept that everyone simultaneously understands and immediately puts them at ease: shopping!

Shopping removes the pressure of being right or wrong — a layman immediately understands “picking and choosing” the right “fit.” Shopping also releases dopamine, which activates the brain’s reward and pleasure centers. This is important because it creates positive feelings while driving clients toward action.

Voilà — the birth of the Design Shopping exercise! Good feelings and design discussion equal nerd out!

Live look at design nerd-out! (Image source: ‘Mochimochi Land’ by Anna Hrachovec)

Yay! Now that we’ve set the tone, let’s get into the thick of this process: defining why and what we’re shopping for. This gives our team a much-needed opportunity to slow down and get inspired. In other words — get deep on the project. Our research and final set of artifacts are what frame the design conversation during the exercise.

To have a meaningful “I see you” moment with the DMV team, we needed to demonstrate to the stakeholder group that we were engaged and ready to translate their goals into tangible design results.

Swim In That Research

Ground your design thinking prior to visual exploration and workshop planning. Not all of these are required, but if it’s within your team’s control, have the following ready:

  • Identified project goals;
  • Problem statements;
  • Competitive analysis;
  • Mental model comparisons;
  • Historical context;
  • Project brief;
  • Preliminary UX discovery;
  • Content maps.

Sharing all the love for design. (Image source: ‘Mochimochi Land’ by Anna Hrachovec)

Go Deep

Make time for your brain to wander and get lost. When collecting artifacts for the design shopping exercise consider both sides of the coin: successful and unsuccessful examples that demonstrate what you’ve grocked from the research above.

Lead the conversation with ease by using the artifacts as a path and conversation trigger. Look for opportunities to point at:

  • Aesthetics or preferences;
  • Design understanding toward user experience;
  • Business goals;
  • Specific calls to action;
  • And how design can help support all of that beyond just looks.

This gives clients greater ownership of the design vision based on tangible benefits to their organization or user experience.

Tactical Inspiration

Don’t limit design inspiration to what you’re familiar with. Get weird! Here’s a brief list of where our team looks for inspiration:

Focus Your Artifacts

We’ve found that limiting the number of design shopping artifacts to 5-7 total, helps the team maintain focus and avoid fatigue. To narrow down the website artifacts, choose:

  • One in their vertical for familiarity and showcasing an understanding of fundamentals.
  • One outside the vertical that demonstrates or challenges brand attributes.
  • One that demonstrates challenging design choices (you think they’ll hate it).
  • One that demonstrates thoughtful design choices (you think they’ll love it).
  • Something they outlined in your research (ie. something the client has already pointed out) you want to dive deeper into.
  • One that’s reflective of the mental model of their audience (what you think will appeal to your understanding of their target).

Set Those Wheels In Motion

Choose Your Champions

Pump the breaks — before you jump into showing the client these sites, assign a facilitator. This champion will guide the group through the workshop, encourage participation, and help the group work toward outlined goals. Also assign an official notetaker to document the conversation to allow our facilitator(s) much appreciated space to focus on the participants.

With the DMV, we had an unusually large stakeholder group so we had two facilitators run the room. To achieve the same experience in a virtual setting, using multiple breakout rooms with more than one facilitator also works really well.

Workshop Materials

Next, gather your materials. Virtual or on-site, you should have:

  • Red and green color coding labels aka dot stickers;
  • Emoji stickers — these are a fun addition to the traditional red and green for votes;
  • Post-it notes for comments;
  • Screenshots of websites.

Here’s how it looks set up on a Miro board:

Stop, Collaborate And Listen

Whether your workshop is online or in-person, you must first set ground rules. Take the first 5-10 minutes of the workshop to break the ice — make sure the loudest stakeholders don’t control the entire conversation.

If driving a virtual workshop (the answer these days is a resounding YES), be sure to unblock technology paralysis. Confirm all systems are a go with a quick demo of how to use the tools you’ll be accessing during the workshop. This can take another 5-10 minutes.

If time is of the essence, send the virtual board ahead of time with some DIY instructions so workshop participants are more prepared to participate.

Then, set clear expectations and reiterate the purpose of the workshop.

Voting Parameters

Make sure to limit the number of votes each participant has. Whether these votes are virtual dots or real stickers, limit the amount of dots to 5 green and 5 red, for a total of 10 votes.

We’ve found that limiting the number of votes forces participants to be more deliberate when shopping, which leads to richer conversations and results. As a fun bonus, we provide a set of emojis for those emotionally charged shopping moments. This tends to get a lot of love from participants!

Ready, Set, Shop!

Once your client has all the tools, it’s time to shop shop shop! Set the timer for 15 minutes and invite participants to mingle while they vote on their favorite and least-favorite aspects of the designs before them. While they vote, ask pointed questions about the “whats” and “whys.”

We’ve found that standing while completing this exercise shifts the lens and puts participants on an even playing field. During this pandemic, we’ve explored options to add this experience to the virtual space and found that pre-filling the voting panels with avatars of the participants adds a nice human element and shifts the lens in much the same way as standing together does. Ghost cursors are just weird, am I right?

Guiding The Conversation

When the timer runs out, discuss the team’s shopping success. This is where you get to the heart of the shared language for the project. As you walk through each artifact, discuss patterns that start to emerge — both negative and positive.

We invite shoppers to volunteer. For example, say “I’m seeing a lot of green dots here. Let’s talk about why?”

Rather than singling out participants, this opens up to the room for discussion and evaluation. This is especially important when dealing with a large and varied stakeholder group like the DMV. This is a team effort and every step should feel collaborative.

The intent is to eliminate the pressure of a “correct answer.”

You want to hear the client’s design vocabulary and build upon that. Through this evaluation, you can begin to connect the dots and lead the team to foundational design principles and decisions you’ll be making throughout the following design phases.

Communicate Results

After everyone is done shopping, validate with the team what you’re seeing as a result of the exercise.

Outline all the areas where you have consensus, where you diverge, and note what the next steps look like.

We are not responsible for any impromptu dance moves from participants.

Once More, With Feeling

While we just outlined all the major ways you can run the design shopping workshop, this isn’t limited to a one-time exercise. We often have one final round of Design Shopping at another date.

This is where you take what was established in the first workshop and create.

Once in the middle of prototypes, moodboards, style tiles, and design principles — whatever you deem to be the best platform for expressing the design direction — you can use the Design Shopping exercise as a way to validate your own design solutions. If still stuck, throw in a Design Spectrum exercise to get really specific.

With a comfortable rapport already built and the client already familiar with the workshop, you can move past the initial aches of building a design vocabulary and move straight to evaluating and discussing the design.

Conclusion

The Design Shopping workflow allows you to move quickly toward a shared design vocabulary and foundational design principles in a deliberate, meaningful way. It’s like taking a road trip across California: you need to review your destinations and how you want to experience them before hitting the road.

As an industry, we are always talking about educating the client, but rarely structure that education in a way that’s not only painless but fun. Considering the amount of pressure the DMV team was under, the last thing our team wanted to do was add further stress, as further stress leads to poor outcomes for client relationships and of course, design.

The thing to remember is that the fun has a purpose — you’re gaining collective agreement for future communications to preemptively head off conflict. The visual nature of this workshop also adds value for stakeholders that may have missed the live session. When they refer back to the shopping exercise, it’s clear what direction to double down on and what to avoid.

In the end, Design Shopping is less about shopping for nice fonts or colors and more about showcasing the ROI (Return on Investment) of thoughtful design. It’s about creating a forum that allows creative possibilities to be discussed openly in an accessible way.

When done right, this exercise allows your client to see real potential because you showed them real examples where design has come to life. The abstract has now become concrete! With that foundation in place, you can look forward to creative innovation and confidence from your toughest critics: your clients.

Special Thanks

All the Kudos to Lea Alcantara (Visual Design Director at 10up), my design nerd out partner (who helps me craft useful workshops for our clients at 10up, including this one), and for the additional article tweaks and research done!

Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

28 Nov

Design Shopping: Get A Faster Client Buy-In Through A Guided Design Showcase

by TBSCategories: News

Regardless of where you live, getting your driver’s license renewed or the address updated on your personal ID card may often be a painful chore. It’s such a frustrating experience that Disney’s Zootopia movie (IMDb) thought it best to represent DMV employees as sloths. Despite popular opinion, however, the California DMV (California Department of Motor Vehicles) is highly motivated to better serve the 30 million licensed drivers in California.

Better serving those citizens means improving a frustrating website experience — the primary way Californians access necessary services. That’s why the DMV Strike Team hired our design team at 10up to reimagine the entire California DMV website.

In the following case study, we’ll take a close look at a design exercise that we call internally Design Shopping. This exercise allows us to better communicate with the client and to more easily move our collaboration in the right direction.

Note: This article is geared more towards experienced UX/UI design teams working on some rather large projects.

Design Shopping?

Before we get to the finished product (the new DMV website), we have to start at the very beginning: understanding the client. As a government agency, they (therefore, we) had many stakeholders to juggle with varying motivations. This meant gaining client alignment during the discovery phase was our top priority.

While we don’t expect clients to be design-savvy — many find the concept of design confusing or intimidating — we need to get everyone on the same page. But how were we able to move the needle on design in a government works project?

We took them shopping. Design Shopping, that is.

Why “Design Shopping”?

When it comes to client services, first impressions are everything. Leaving a lasting impression, however, isn’t always easy, especially when working with a large and varied stakeholder group. To do so, let’s take a lesson from the great American poet, Maya Angelou:

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

— Maya Angelou

Cue the trumpets! From the very first to the very last interactions with our team, to leave a lasting impression on clients, we must make them feel good.

With these precious first moments in mind, our team experimented with various approaches to provide the DMV team a safe space to feel a connection and build rapport so everyone feels confident and comfortable sharing their ideas and opinions without judgment.

What we landed on is a concept that everyone simultaneously understands and immediately puts them at ease: shopping!

Shopping removes the pressure of being right or wrong — a layman immediately understands “picking and choosing” the right “fit.” Shopping also releases dopamine, which activates the brain’s reward and pleasure centers. This is important because it creates positive feelings while driving clients toward action.

Voilà — the birth of the Design Shopping exercise! Good feelings and design discussion equal nerd out!

Live look at design nerd-out! (Image source: ‘Mochimochi Land’ by Anna Hrachovec)

Yay! Now that we’ve set the tone, let’s get into the thick of this process: defining why and what we’re shopping for. This gives our team a much-needed opportunity to slow down and get inspired. In other words — get deep on the project. Our research and final set of artifacts are what frame the design conversation during the exercise.

To have a meaningful “I see you” moment with the DMV team, we needed to demonstrate to the stakeholder group that we were engaged and ready to translate their goals into tangible design results.

Swim In That Research

Ground your design thinking prior to visual exploration and workshop planning. Not all of these are required, but if it’s within your team’s control, have the following ready:

  • Identified project goals;
  • Problem statements;
  • Competitive analysis;
  • Mental model comparisons;
  • Historical context;
  • Project brief;
  • Preliminary UX discovery;
  • Content maps.

Sharing all the love for design. (Image source: ‘Mochimochi Land’ by Anna Hrachovec)

Go Deep

Make time for your brain to wander and get lost. When collecting artifacts for the design shopping exercise consider both sides of the coin: successful and unsuccessful examples that demonstrate what you’ve grocked from the research above.

Lead the conversation with ease by using the artifacts as a path and conversation trigger. Look for opportunities to point at:

  • Aesthetics or preferences;
  • Design understanding toward user experience;
  • Business goals;
  • Specific calls to action;
  • And how design can help support all of that beyond just looks.

This gives clients greater ownership of the design vision based on tangible benefits to their organization or user experience.

Tactical Inspiration

Don’t limit design inspiration to what you’re familiar with. Get weird! Here’s a brief list of where our team looks for inspiration:

Focus Your Artifacts

We’ve found that limiting the number of design shopping artifacts to 5-7 total, helps the team maintain focus and avoid fatigue. To narrow down the website artifacts, choose:

  • One in their vertical for familiarity and showcasing an understanding of fundamentals.
  • One outside the vertical that demonstrates or challenges brand attributes.
  • One that demonstrates challenging design choices (you think they’ll hate it).
  • One that demonstrates thoughtful design choices (you think they’ll love it).
  • Something they outlined in your research (ie. something the client has already pointed out) you want to dive deeper into.
  • One that’s reflective of the mental model of their audience (what you think will appeal to your understanding of their target).

Set Those Wheels In Motion

Choose Your Champions

Pump the breaks — before you jump into showing the client these sites, assign a facilitator. This champion will guide the group through the workshop, encourage participation, and help the group work toward outlined goals. Also assign an official notetaker to document the conversation to allow our facilitator(s) much appreciated space to focus on the participants.

With the DMV, we had an unusually large stakeholder group so we had two facilitators run the room. To achieve the same experience in a virtual setting, using multiple breakout rooms with more than one facilitator also works really well.

Workshop Materials

Next, gather your materials. Virtual or on-site, you should have:

  • Red and green color coding labels aka dot stickers;
  • Emoji stickers — these are a fun addition to the traditional red and green for votes;
  • Post-it notes for comments;
  • Screenshots of websites.

Here’s how it looks set up on a Miro board:

Stop, Collaborate And Listen

Whether your workshop is online or in-person, you must first set ground rules. Take the first 5-10 minutes of the workshop to break the ice — make sure the loudest stakeholders don’t control the entire conversation.

If driving a virtual workshop (the answer these days is a resounding YES), be sure to unblock technology paralysis. Confirm all systems are a go with a quick demo of how to use the tools you’ll be accessing during the workshop. This can take another 5-10 minutes.

If time is of the essence, send the virtual board ahead of time with some DIY instructions so workshop participants are more prepared to participate.

Then, set clear expectations and reiterate the purpose of the workshop.

Voting Parameters

Make sure to limit the number of votes each participant has. Whether these votes are virtual dots or real stickers, limit the amount of dots to 5 green and 5 red, for a total of 10 votes.

We’ve found that limiting the number of votes forces participants to be more deliberate when shopping, which leads to richer conversations and results. As a fun bonus, we provide a set of emojis for those emotionally charged shopping moments. This tends to get a lot of love from participants!

Ready, Set, Shop!

Once your client has all the tools, it’s time to shop shop shop! Set the timer for 15 minutes and invite participants to mingle while they vote on their favorite and least-favorite aspects of the designs before them. While they vote, ask pointed questions about the “whats” and “whys.”

We’ve found that standing while completing this exercise shifts the lens and puts participants on an even playing field. During this pandemic, we’ve explored options to add this experience to the virtual space and found that pre-filling the voting panels with avatars of the participants adds a nice human element and shifts the lens in much the same way as standing together does. Ghost cursors are just weird, am I right?

Guiding The Conversation

When the timer runs out, discuss the team’s shopping success. This is where you get to the heart of the shared language for the project. As you walk through each artifact, discuss patterns that start to emerge — both negative and positive.

We invite shoppers to volunteer. For example, say “I’m seeing a lot of green dots here. Let’s talk about why?”

Rather than singling out participants, this opens up to the room for discussion and evaluation. This is especially important when dealing with a large and varied stakeholder group like the DMV. This is a team effort and every step should feel collaborative.

The intent is to eliminate the pressure of a “correct answer.”

You want to hear the client’s design vocabulary and build upon that. Through this evaluation, you can begin to connect the dots and lead the team to foundational design principles and decisions you’ll be making throughout the following design phases.

Communicate Results

After everyone is done shopping, validate with the team what you’re seeing as a result of the exercise.

Outline all the areas where you have consensus, where you diverge, and note what the next steps look like.

We are not responsible for any impromptu dance moves from participants.

Once More, With Feeling

While we just outlined all the major ways you can run the design shopping workshop, this isn’t limited to a one-time exercise. We often have one final round of Design Shopping at another date.

This is where you take what was established in the first workshop and create.

Once in the middle of prototypes, moodboards, style tiles, and design principles — whatever you deem to be the best platform for expressing the design direction — you can use the Design Shopping exercise as a way to validate your own design solutions. If still stuck, throw in a Design Spectrum exercise to get really specific.

With a comfortable rapport already built and the client already familiar with the workshop, you can move past the initial aches of building a design vocabulary and move straight to evaluating and discussing the design.

Conclusion

The Design Shopping workflow allows you to move quickly toward a shared design vocabulary and foundational design principles in a deliberate, meaningful way. It’s like taking a road trip across California: you need to review your destinations and how you want to experience them before hitting the road.

As an industry, we are always talking about educating the client, but rarely structure that education in a way that’s not only painless but fun. Considering the amount of pressure the DMV team was under, the last thing our team wanted to do was add further stress, as further stress leads to poor outcomes for client relationships and of course, design.

The thing to remember is that the fun has a purpose — you’re gaining collective agreement for future communications to preemptively head off conflict. The visual nature of this workshop also adds value for stakeholders that may have missed the live session. When they refer back to the shopping exercise, it’s clear what direction to double down on and what to avoid.

In the end, Design Shopping is less about shopping for nice fonts or colors and more about showcasing the ROI (Return on Investment) of thoughtful design. It’s about creating a forum that allows creative possibilities to be discussed openly in an accessible way.

When done right, this exercise allows your client to see real potential because you showed them real examples where design has come to life. The abstract has now become concrete! With that foundation in place, you can look forward to creative innovation and confidence from your toughest critics: your clients.

Special Thanks

All the Kudos to Lea Alcantara (Visual Design Director at 10up), my design nerd out partner (who helps me craft useful workshops for our clients at 10up, including this one), and for the additional article tweaks and research done!

Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

28 Nov

Design Shopping: Get A Faster Client Buy-In Through A Guided Design Showcase

by TBSCategories: News

Regardless of where you live, getting your driver’s license renewed or the address updated on your personal ID card may often be a painful chore. It’s such a frustrating experience that Disney’s Zootopia movie (IMDb) thought it best to represent DMV employees as sloths. Despite popular opinion, however, the California DMV (California Department of Motor Vehicles) is highly motivated to better serve the 30 million licensed drivers in California.

Better serving those citizens means improving a frustrating website experience — the primary way Californians access necessary services. That’s why the DMV Strike Team hired our design team at 10up to reimagine the entire California DMV website.

In the following case study, we’ll take a close look at a design exercise that we call internally Design Shopping. This exercise allows us to better communicate with the client and to more easily move our collaboration in the right direction.

Note: This article is geared more towards experienced UX/UI design teams working on some rather large projects.

Design Shopping?

Before we get to the finished product (the new DMV website), we have to start at the very beginning: understanding the client. As a government agency, they (therefore, we) had many stakeholders to juggle with varying motivations. This meant gaining client alignment during the discovery phase was our top priority.

While we don’t expect clients to be design-savvy — many find the concept of design confusing or intimidating — we need to get everyone on the same page. But how were we able to move the needle on design in a government works project?

We took them shopping. Design Shopping, that is.

Why “Design Shopping”?

When it comes to client services, first impressions are everything. Leaving a lasting impression, however, isn’t always easy, especially when working with a large and varied stakeholder group. To do so, let’s take a lesson from the great American poet, Maya Angelou:

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

— Maya Angelou

Cue the trumpets! From the very first to the very last interactions with our team, to leave a lasting impression on clients, we must make them feel good.

With these precious first moments in mind, our team experimented with various approaches to provide the DMV team a safe space to feel a connection and build rapport so everyone feels confident and comfortable sharing their ideas and opinions without judgment.

What we landed on is a concept that everyone simultaneously understands and immediately puts them at ease: shopping!

Shopping removes the pressure of being right or wrong — a layman immediately understands “picking and choosing” the right “fit.” Shopping also releases dopamine, which activates the brain’s reward and pleasure centers. This is important because it creates positive feelings while driving clients toward action.

Voilà — the birth of the Design Shopping exercise! Good feelings and design discussion equal nerd out!

Live look at design nerd-out! (Image source: ‘Mochimochi Land’ by Anna Hrachovec)

Yay! Now that we’ve set the tone, let’s get into the thick of this process: defining why and what we’re shopping for. This gives our team a much-needed opportunity to slow down and get inspired. In other words — get deep on the project. Our research and final set of artifacts are what frame the design conversation during the exercise.

To have a meaningful “I see you” moment with the DMV team, we needed to demonstrate to the stakeholder group that we were engaged and ready to translate their goals into tangible design results.

Swim In That Research

Ground your design thinking prior to visual exploration and workshop planning. Not all of these are required, but if it’s within your team’s control, have the following ready:

  • Identified project goals;
  • Problem statements;
  • Competitive analysis;
  • Mental model comparisons;
  • Historical context;
  • Project brief;
  • Preliminary UX discovery;
  • Content maps.

Sharing all the love for design. (Image source: ‘Mochimochi Land’ by Anna Hrachovec)

Go Deep

Make time for your brain to wander and get lost. When collecting artifacts for the design shopping exercise consider both sides of the coin: successful and unsuccessful examples that demonstrate what you’ve grocked from the research above.

Lead the conversation with ease by using the artifacts as a path and conversation trigger. Look for opportunities to point at:

  • Aesthetics or preferences;
  • Design understanding toward user experience;
  • Business goals;
  • Specific calls to action;
  • And how design can help support all of that beyond just looks.

This gives clients greater ownership of the design vision based on tangible benefits to their organization or user experience.

Tactical Inspiration

Don’t limit design inspiration to what you’re familiar with. Get weird! Here’s a brief list of where our team looks for inspiration:

Focus Your Artifacts

We’ve found that limiting the number of design shopping artifacts to 5-7 total, helps the team maintain focus and avoid fatigue. To narrow down the website artifacts, choose:

  • One in their vertical for familiarity and showcasing an understanding of fundamentals.
  • One outside the vertical that demonstrates or challenges brand attributes.
  • One that demonstrates challenging design choices (you think they’ll hate it).
  • One that demonstrates thoughtful design choices (you think they’ll love it).
  • Something they outlined in your research (ie. something the client has already pointed out) you want to dive deeper into.
  • One that’s reflective of the mental model of their audience (what you think will appeal to your understanding of their target).

Set Those Wheels In Motion

Choose Your Champions

Pump the breaks — before you jump into showing the client these sites, assign a facilitator. This champion will guide the group through the workshop, encourage participation, and help the group work toward outlined goals. Also assign an official notetaker to document the conversation to allow our facilitator(s) much appreciated space to focus on the participants.

With the DMV, we had an unusually large stakeholder group so we had two facilitators run the room. To achieve the same experience in a virtual setting, using multiple breakout rooms with more than one facilitator also works really well.

Workshop Materials

Next, gather your materials. Virtual or on-site, you should have:

  • Red and green color coding labels aka dot stickers;
  • Emoji stickers — these are a fun addition to the traditional red and green for votes;
  • Post-it notes for comments;
  • Screenshots of websites.

Here’s how it looks set up on a Miro board:

Stop, Collaborate And Listen

Whether your workshop is online or in-person, you must first set ground rules. Take the first 5-10 minutes of the workshop to break the ice — make sure the loudest stakeholders don’t control the entire conversation.

If driving a virtual workshop (the answer these days is a resounding YES), be sure to unblock technology paralysis. Confirm all systems are a go with a quick demo of how to use the tools you’ll be accessing during the workshop. This can take another 5-10 minutes.

If time is of the essence, send the virtual board ahead of time with some DIY instructions so workshop participants are more prepared to participate.

Then, set clear expectations and reiterate the purpose of the workshop.

Voting Parameters

Make sure to limit the number of votes each participant has. Whether these votes are virtual dots or real stickers, limit the amount of dots to 5 green and 5 red, for a total of 10 votes.

We’ve found that limiting the number of votes forces participants to be more deliberate when shopping, which leads to richer conversations and results. As a fun bonus, we provide a set of emojis for those emotionally charged shopping moments. This tends to get a lot of love from participants!

Ready, Set, Shop!

Once your client has all the tools, it’s time to shop shop shop! Set the timer for 15 minutes and invite participants to mingle while they vote on their favorite and least-favorite aspects of the designs before them. While they vote, ask pointed questions about the “whats” and “whys.”

We’ve found that standing while completing this exercise shifts the lens and puts participants on an even playing field. During this pandemic, we’ve explored options to add this experience to the virtual space and found that pre-filling the voting panels with avatars of the participants adds a nice human element and shifts the lens in much the same way as standing together does. Ghost cursors are just weird, am I right?

Guiding The Conversation

When the timer runs out, discuss the team’s shopping success. This is where you get to the heart of the shared language for the project. As you walk through each artifact, discuss patterns that start to emerge — both negative and positive.

We invite shoppers to volunteer. For example, say “I’m seeing a lot of green dots here. Let’s talk about why?”

Rather than singling out participants, this opens up to the room for discussion and evaluation. This is especially important when dealing with a large and varied stakeholder group like the DMV. This is a team effort and every step should feel collaborative.

The intent is to eliminate the pressure of a “correct answer.”

You want to hear the client’s design vocabulary and build upon that. Through this evaluation, you can begin to connect the dots and lead the team to foundational design principles and decisions you’ll be making throughout the following design phases.

Communicate Results

After everyone is done shopping, validate with the team what you’re seeing as a result of the exercise.

Outline all the areas where you have consensus, where you diverge, and note what the next steps look like.

We are not responsible for any impromptu dance moves from participants.

Once More, With Feeling

While we just outlined all the major ways you can run the design shopping workshop, this isn’t limited to a one-time exercise. We often have one final round of Design Shopping at another date.

This is where you take what was established in the first workshop and create.

Once in the middle of prototypes, moodboards, style tiles, and design principles — whatever you deem to be the best platform for expressing the design direction — you can use the Design Shopping exercise as a way to validate your own design solutions. If still stuck, throw in a Design Spectrum exercise to get really specific.

With a comfortable rapport already built and the client already familiar with the workshop, you can move past the initial aches of building a design vocabulary and move straight to evaluating and discussing the design.

Conclusion

The Design Shopping workflow allows you to move quickly toward a shared design vocabulary and foundational design principles in a deliberate, meaningful way. It’s like taking a road trip across California: you need to review your destinations and how you want to experience them before hitting the road.

As an industry, we are always talking about educating the client, but rarely structure that education in a way that’s not only painless but fun. Considering the amount of pressure the DMV team was under, the last thing our team wanted to do was add further stress, as further stress leads to poor outcomes for client relationships and of course, design.

The thing to remember is that the fun has a purpose — you’re gaining collective agreement for future communications to preemptively head off conflict. The visual nature of this workshop also adds value for stakeholders that may have missed the live session. When they refer back to the shopping exercise, it’s clear what direction to double down on and what to avoid.

In the end, Design Shopping is less about shopping for nice fonts or colors and more about showcasing the ROI (Return on Investment) of thoughtful design. It’s about creating a forum that allows creative possibilities to be discussed openly in an accessible way.

When done right, this exercise allows your client to see real potential because you showed them real examples where design has come to life. The abstract has now become concrete! With that foundation in place, you can look forward to creative innovation and confidence from your toughest critics: your clients.

Special Thanks

All the Kudos to Lea Alcantara (Visual Design Director at 10up), my design nerd out partner (who helps me craft useful workshops for our clients at 10up, including this one), and for the additional article tweaks and research done!

Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

live-illustrating-2-chalkmarkers
17 Dec

Live Sketching A Site Visitor Journey To Create A Sitemap With Your Client

by TBSCategories: News

Live Sketching A Site Visitor Journey To Create A Sitemap With Your Client

Live Sketching A Site Visitor Journey To Create A Sitemap With Your Client

Matt Orley

Drawing can instantly lower barriers and make communication with a client much easier. Having a face-to-face meeting with your client can cause anxiety for those of us that push pixels for a living, but even the simplest kind of sketching can help. On top of drawing, let’s take a few clues from a meeting rockstar: Priya Parker.

Author of the book “The Art of Gathering” and TED Talk speaker, Priya Parker is a proponent of making gatherings (and meetings!) meaningful. Her top line meeting ideas include allowing some controversy, fostering group decision making, and setting meeting goals. I’ll touch on all three of these items and show how to use the act of drawing to accomplish them.

Our Example

Let’s walk through such a goal-oriented sitemap meeting. Our faux-client: an event service company called BPS Events Services. They rent tables, designs centerpieces, and acts as a one-stop shop for sit-down events — everything but the food. Let’s go meet the team: a marketer, salesman, warehouse manager, and one executive officer. All very different points of view.

Walk in the door, make your introductions, and start off with goals in mind (and in voice). Declare the goal and set a time limit at the forefront. Avoid sloppy language like “I want to have a sitemap from today’s meeting” but use more concrete terms such as “The output from today’s 90-minute meeting will be a sitemap.” Expectations are always appreciated, and so are time limits.

Leave Your Laptop At Home, Markers Are The Better Tool

I don’t use technology to organize the thoughts of my clients. Adding a layer of digitization between what is said and what is captured is a barrier that clients find difficult to overcome, and frankly, off-putting. If a client is afraid of the tech you are using to craft something, they may devalue the input they wish to offer because of that fear.

I want full honesty, and I want my permission to correct me, in order to get things right. That’s why I use large-scale drawing on a whiteboard. Not only does it work in realtime, but it’s also correctable, and I know that when my customer picks up a marker; they really have full intentions to help me understand the whole story of their company and their customers.

The whiteboard as a canvas is large enough to expand on important points, to create concepts that are temporary before they are made permanent (or erased!) and even allow for those in a room to stretch. The whiteboard is energy; it’s the energy of creativity, the energy of idea exploration, and it allows everyone to make mistakes. It’s a perfect canvas when ideas are not nailed down.

And I will admit, a marker may induce a bit of fear to many (we’ve all heard it, or said it: “I can’t draw”) but no one is afraid to write a word or two, or tell someone else what to visibly edit!

Recommended reading: Doodling: How Can Designers Use This To Their Benefit?

Now let’s fill your room with some energy!

Invite Surprise Guests To Add Controversy

Your client is made up of several different stakeholders, with varying responsibilities and personalities, and each with different website “must-haves”. The best possible person in the room, however, should be a prospective customer acting as a website visitor. As this invite may not be possible, a set of proxies made up of personas will do.

Inviting made up personas into the meeting may work against the ambitions and personal goals of your real attendees. What fun!

Creating Our New Guests

A customer persona, (with its physical manifestation being a customer profile) is a specification of a user that your client may encounter. They can be detailed and complex, or extremely simple.

Many customer profiles include information including an avatar or photo, demographic information, interests, and how they spend their money.

The persona is used as a lensing tool to understand how a customer may act, feel, and interact with your brand or organization. In our case, it is website specific.

For BPS Events Services, we will create three customer persona profiles to act as typical site visitors that may be buyers:

  • Camryn, the corporate event coordinator;
  • Steve, the CFO of a mid-sized company planning a sales meeting;
  • Kelly, the independent wedding planner.
Customer Journey Profiles
A graphic list of web-oriented characteristics for our three example personas (Large preview)

I start with a name, age, and any other demographic or personal characteristics to make them seem real. The more real a person seems, the more likely your team can sympathize with their positions. Hats, actions and locations can enhance “cartoony” stick figures well and help tell the story.

Second, I focus on four simple persona statements:

  • The device used to visit your site,
  • Decision level,
  • Pain points
  • Motivators.

These four personal statements tell the room how the person may interact with your company, why they need may need you, and how you can influence them. It’s basic yes, but we have set ourselves up with only 90 minutes!

More importantly, the customer profiles must be made visible by the whole group at once — not just paper on the table. Large visible profiles are the stand-in for the actual persona. They can be pointed to, stood in front of, yelled at, and can accept empathy (as much as markings on a board can receive!)

The Value Of Visitor Presence

The real value of having site visitor profiles in the room is the lens they provide for present stakeholders. Forcing attendees to see a new website tailored to visitor needs adds a little controversy, and forces all to see the problems through new eyes.

Similar to the Thinking Hats group discussion system, customer personas allow meeting attendees to see through new eyes and look through filters that remove selfish motives -effectively putting down personal agendas. This methodology is a helpful tool for web designers who many struggle with getting clients to think visitor-first.

Additionally, you likely don’t have to be “the bad guy”. Likely one person in attendance will be a customer persona advocate. This person will police the others and call them out if the personas are not honored — and even defend the personas. This advocate may never have had the chance to steer others into the customer-focused viewpoint before — and this may very well be one of those few chances.

Step On Up To The Whiteboard

Many create customer profiles ahead of time on paper or boards (a project for you, dear web designer, or for your client). But they can also be created rough, on the fly, and on a whiteboard with various degrees of detail. I personally like creating them live because attendees can have a say and make adjustments.

Tip: Getting 10 minutes alone with your target whiteboard before a meeting can work wonders!

Don’t overdo it, just create something clean, legible, and that can be referenced throughout the meeting!

Being able to point to a persona is important in the upcoming conversations. The examples above are created with large names so they can be spoken in the room, with common color schemes for ease of recognition, and with text in black for easy readability.

Whiteboards are of course ubiquitously available in conference rooms across the industrialized world. Hate squeaky whiteboards? Get a 48” wide roll of paper online and some no-bleed low-odor markers like Mister Sketch or Neuland brand.

Some More Drawing Tips

In the case of the whiteboard, you may be tempted to use that readily available red marker for multiple components — resist! Invest in your own set of whiteboard markers and look like a champ — there are a variety of choices out there: rainbow colors, standard colors in wide widths, and even neon-colored chalk-based markers (whiteboard safe) that come with thicknesses as wide as 15mm! Nothing says “Wow I know what I am doing” quite like hot pink in a world of faded thin blue lines.

Chalk Markers suggested for business whiteboard use
Thick and vibrant chalk-based whiteboard markers make your whiteboard work highly unique. (Large preview)

The Visitor Journey Through The New Website

A Customer journey is typically defined as the empathetic review of a customer’s interaction with a problem and your solution. This is generally used in broader scope-marketing campaigns. Customer journeys can be incredibly powerful and telling but also complicated.

Let’s start simple, and ask your customers personas how they plan to navigate your new or revised website.

Let The Sitemap Guidance Begin!

Today we are NOT talking about how visitors GET to the website, but only, what their experience is once they get there.

Assign a landing page for every visitor. If you have guidance from an existing data set of analytics, borrow the top three landing pages. If you don’t, choose from what you know and can assume: the home page, the number one standalone product or service, and an evergreen blog post. (Considering landing pages for specific campaigns? Go for it!)

Whiteboard Format for Customer Journey
A sample whiteboard setup ready for customer journey questioning and pathfinding (Large preview)

Use your whiteboard to craft the very beginnings of a sitemap in a format that suggests room for growth. The center of the whiteboard is used for the customer’s ‘page’ journeys, and the right sidebar is used to capture the sitemap in an organized fashion of your choice.

Ask the room: “When your users land on their first page of your site on their first visit, what do they see and how do they feel? Let’s start with Camryn (persona 1).”

The responses to this question should go well beyond sitemap preference. Because the question offered the verb “feel” you will find responses including words like trust, payday, relief, confusion, leadership, and so on. This empathetic question sets the tone for the rest of your meeting, helps you understand your client’s own brand understanding, and opens up the conversation on the right foot.

Run through this question for each persona, and log the information on the whiteboard around that starter page in a mindmap fashion. Whether it is feelings, lack of information, desire for more, confusion, or “heck I’m ready to buy now already”, every comment can act as a potential pathway to new content.

The responses may also be very concrete like, “I need to find the phone number for sales”, or “I need to know the minimum order size for the new biodegradable plate designs.” These are obviously just as important, but don’t let them be the only responses.

Customer Journey - Whiteboard - Feelings
Let the personas ‘answer’ questions about how they feel and what they are looking for on your pages. (Large preview)

Building The Content Web

Now that we have guessed at what the user feels and is thinking at each page, let’s act as a guide and show them some link options. We are going to respond to the first page responses in a conversational, back and forth kind of way… Almost like a website guide.

Note: At this point, we’re acting as guides to lead the user from a point of zero information to one of decision making, comfort, trust, and inquiry. If you are a fan of the StoryBrand method by Donald Miller, you will identify with the story consent and guidance component that we are building.

With your gathered group, draw possible links to new pages that answer the questions or respond to the feelings that you previously generated. It is important to remind your group that we’re only answering the thoughts of the personas user here.

These links are drawn in a web format across your whiteboard to second click pages. It is not yet in a sitemap format, but one that shows the importance of that second click. Allow overlap between personas.

As new pages are defined, log them in your right sidebar in a top-level nav format.

Whiteboard Customer Journey - Second Level Pages
Website Pages are created to answer the first round of persona questions. (Large preview)

Drawing Suggestions

I suggest creating your page blocks as black text with black containers around them. Use a different color ink to create the arrow/line/connector links between the blocks.

Repeat this entire process and keep going: focus on feelings, information, and website guidance to lead your customer towards connecting with your brand in a hard or soft way through an eventual on page Call-to-Action (e.g. Buy Now, vs. Facebook Like, vs. Download our Guide).

Hopefully, some questions may look back to other pages, or force attendees to consider new places to put answers to specific questions. Try your best to exhaust the customer journey through your site with this process.

Whiteboard Customer Experience- Arrows, Boxes, Feelings
A full conversation with webpage list derived from possible pathways (Large preview)

Fostering Group Decision Making On The Board

Try not to erase items that have already been added to a board. Instead, I like to add graphical tags to items: Stars, checkmarks or plus signs for affirmations, and frowny faces, minus symbols, and Xs for negative feedback.

You can also use colors to denote positive and negative feedback: green and red.* This method can show the team decision-making and encourages feedback, without wiping out concepts already discussed.

* Keep in mind that if you do decide to use colors, always ask if anyone in the room is colorblind.

From Journey To Sitemap

If you are familiar with Google Analytics (GA), you may see similarities between what we are creating and what is reported in GA Behavior Flow. That’s a good thing. If you have GA data, compare it with the content flow you are crafting. Are there similarities? Are there differences? Does it matter for the redesign?

A blurred image of a Google Analytics Flow Dashboard
A blurred image of a Google Analytics Flow Dashboard. Comparing customer journeys to actual analytics data may validate your new plan. (Large preview)

The beautiful thing about the journey discussions is the lack of fluff and the limitations that it places on page count. This method simplifies the view of the website for many stakeholders.

By taking the journey steps and creating pages for those steps, you’re creating a sitemap that is extremely satisfying for participants. The simple approach to messaging and compression results in a website unlike what they would have imagined, but exactly what they wanted.

Wrapping Up

Communicating with a client on a large canvas such as a whiteboard can be a little scary but tremendously beneficial once you get going. Showing your knowledge for an entire group to see, critique and edit can be hard at first. But drawing as a group is an act of removing barriers.

By communicating visually, blockades to understanding are removed, fear of failure is admonished, and technology is pushed aside. This brings up the opportunity for more good friction — with full understanding and all the cards on the table, er… whiteboard.

The Williemien Brand Team states in the introduction to their book “Visual Thinking” regarding what happens when you draw “you work at the intersection of image, spoken words and written text, where you maximize effectiveness and impact.” This is exactly what our aim should be: let’s keep in mind to continuously utilize the power of our brains to process things visually.

So arm yourselves with some markers, practice up on your whiteboard handwriting and lettering for an hour, and roll out a meeting that your next client won’t soon forget!

Further Reading

Here are some awesome books to keep you motivated:

Smashing Editorial (ah, il)


Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

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