Reframing the brief
A few years ago my agency and I started renaming (or ‘rebranding’) some key components in our creative process to give them better value and better meaning in a human-centred design context.
One small change that drove the biggest impact was simply renaming the client brief to hypothesis.
This was not a provocation towards our clients and their expertise, it was a communication nudge towards a different mindset. It was an invite.
We are well aware that the client is the biggest expert on their product, but sometimes they get lost in assumptions about the people using their product or they get too excited about the flashy technology available (“We need an app”).
The hypothesis
The reaction of some organisations was absolutely game-changing. They embraced the fact that their written brief was a supposition based on limited evidence and they decided to join us in an exciting journey of further investigation.
We connected to their audience in a more profound way, we dove deeper into user research and strategy and we eventually shaped their hypothesis into a creative brief, since we gathered enough data, technological proof and emotional evidence to isolate the core problem to solve.
Just this section of the process was a significant discovery in itself.
It’s natural to think that spending time on the problem framing can be seen as a waste of time by some clients that already have their definition of the problem. They want to see action. They want to see us solving the (hypothesised) problem.
Isn’t it more damaging to walk the wrong direction for a long time, though? Wouldn’t you want to spend a few seconds properly looking at your compass before you start walking in the woods?
