When Art isn’t enough.
Design and Strategy need to work together to solve problems. Clients and digital teams do, too.
ou might have the most beautiful digital experience design the world has ever seen. It might be so visually striking that you get caught up in the thrill of aesthetic and risk missing the point of it altogether. Even worse, your audience does too.
Design is more than just what’s on the surface — the paint and plaster — it’s engineering and functionality. It should serve audience needs and offer lasting value, while using principles of human-centred design, user experience research, and an understanding of human-computer interaction to move, inspire, and engage users. To make something beautiful and to make it work for people, you’ve got to start with the messy part — people
A Digital Experience Is Strategy With Artistic Outputs
Clients come to Filament with ideas for how they want their experience to look but few ideas of how they want it to work to serve their organizational or their customer’s goals. Our job is to address those aesthetic goals while strategically meeting customers where they are and making them feel understood. To truly win an audience’s time, experience creators must practice empathy.
Use that empathy strategically. Your digital experience should be your testing ground. Use it to try ideas, examine how customers react, and craft an experience that speaks to their needs and desires based on the information you collect. Just as every brand is unique, so is every audience. Because of this, it’s critical to collaborate with your creative partners and take the information you gathered from testing to meet organizational goals and serve users in the best ways possible.
How We Ground Creativity in a Game Plan
Artists can become strategists, but they have to be open to a working relationship. For us, this relationship starts on day one. To communicate and work together in a way that is truly collaborative and grounded in trust, we invite clients to share as much as possible with us the first time we meet.
Doing that means we have to be vulnerable, too. So, we listen to clients and tell them how we interpreted what they said. We start by saying, “Here’s how we understood your idea, challenge, problem, desired outcome, etc.,” and finish by saying, “Did we get this right?” We never come from a position of expertise until we’ve built trust and established that we’re listening closely and making them feel heard.
If we do our job, they’ll still feel like creative geniuses at the end of these conversations, and the project will be based on insights and objectives rather than just aesthetic visions. Our process ensures we all have an appreciation for every step that goes into achieving our clients’ strategic goals.
Once we’ve set up the expectation of open collaboration, we go into workshop mode, which we call the “graphic game plan.” This involves us facilitating a teamwide sharing session in which stakeholders, partners, and designers get together in a room and simply talk — something that can seem revolutionary when the world is accustomed to moving quickly and rarely slowing down.
Over the course of three to four hours, we talk through the objectives they hope to meet and nail down the details of how they’ll achieve them.
Why Our Graphic Game Plan Works
From the start, the workshop sparks creative thinking. We find that people relish the chance to have time away from the daily grind to think collectively and they tend to leave with a sense of possibility. It always amazes me that at the end of the meeting, participants marvel at the simple notion that they, along with their colleagues, were able to spend a dedicated amount of time just talking about objectives and goals and actually move a project forward as a result. Even if that’s the only outcome, it’s a bit of a win.
The game plan technique arms us and our clients with a map of targets and objectives. Targets are concrete criteria that define a project’s success and make it possible to measure the performance of your digital experience, thereby giving you fodder for follow-up experiments, iterations, and innovations in the future. Think of it as pass-fail. If you met a specific target, the project was a success. If you didn’t, let’s try again.
These targets also protect the project from whims and spontaneous ideas that don’t fit customer needs. If a partner wants to add an element but it doesn’t contribute to meeting key performance indicators, targets keep it from muddling the experience with unnecessary noise.
As a facilitator, it’s always fun to say, “Great idea. How will it help us reach our targets?” I don’t feel like I’ve just become a Debbie Downer, nor have I made the client feel like they weren’t heard. I’ve simply asked the client to clarify whether the idea should be a priority and prompted the client to express why they feel that way.
Objectives are different — they provide room to dream about what a client wants from projects. The game plan workshop promotes free thinking and opens discussions about desires like wanting the digital experience to feel modern or wanting it to lead to customer response.
Together, targets and objectives prevent many of the usual challenges and miscommunications that can sink creative partnerships.
Throughout our process, there are deliverable meetings and discussions. We begin each meeting with a recap of our decisions so far and why we’ve made them, always tying them back to the strategy we created together, and then move on to discussing the day’s deliverable. On top of that, we do weekly check-ins to keep everyone in the relationship accountable and informed.
Because of the graphic game plan, we work with our clients to keep an important endgame in mind: the defining moment when a client relationship transforms into a partnership. It comes when the client reaches out for advice, which can even be something as informal as a text saying: “Hey, Steve! This came up. Wondering if I can get your perspective on it.”
In this moment, I know Filament has become more than a decorator and has instead transformed into a resource and problem-solving partner. This is when the real art happens.
