Setting goals for your project.

When doing any kind of design project it’s important to have a clear set of goals before you start the actual project. This allows everyone to have a good idea of the expectations and assumptions.

Let’s take a look at some of the goals we need to define:

Business goals.

Having a clear idea on what the business goals behind the project are will allow you to always refer back and have good oversight of the needs behind the actual creative solution. Here are some examples of good business goals:

• We want to reach a new target audience of 18–24 in the category of healthy beverages. We want to have an increase in this segment by 50% by the end of 2019.
• We want to expand our B2B service to a B2C market. We are looking to have a 1000 B2C customers by the end of 2018.
• We want to increase revenue by 100% by the end of 2019. We want to reach this by doubling our margins on our product.

Project goals.

Of course, we can’t always reach the business goals just by doing this one project, often times it’s part of a larger strategy, so we need to define a clear set of goals for the project. For example:

• We want to increase our online sales trough the new website by 50% by the end of April.
• We want our customers to be aware of our new name and services by the end of June.
• Deal with the misconception that we are furniture company, while we actually a clothing brand.

Metrics of success.

Defining the ‘metrics’ of success is a good way to look at goals. Ask yourself (or the client): when will the project be a succes? Here are some examples:

• The project will be a success if we have created an identity that clearly positions us as the newest innovation in cryptocurrency.
• The project will be a success if we have reached 2000 subscriptions on our email list.

Specific vs Broad

As you can clearly see, goals can be really broad, but also really specific. Try to get as much information as you can out of the client, without ‘killing’ the project before it started.

For example, the brief is about creating a new online experience for the latest addition in a Hotel chain. Let’s define some clear goals:

• The main goal is to excite our customers about our new Hotel location. By creating a unique experience we want to get customers warm about visiting the hotel.
• A secondary goal is to position our brand as being an innovative, young company that believes in a new kind of hospitality

As you can see, these goals are not to ‘redundant’ or broad. The art in setting goals is to find the sweet spot between specificity and openness. Project goals should be aspirations that drive the project forward, not box it in.

Let’s take a look at some bad goals and why they aren’t working:

• We want to reach at least 10.000 visitors to our new webpage.
  What is bad about this goal? It’s more about a ‘vanity metric’, get that much visitors. A much more interesting goal would be to think about what kind of impact you want to have on the visitor, what do you want them to feel?
• The website needs to be really colorful, stylish and we want some smooth scrolling.
  What is wrong with this goal? It’s not actually a goal, it’s personal preference, it’s boxing in the whole project and it’s waaaay to specific.
• We want to become more famous.
  This goals is to broad. It gives no clarity about how they want to become famous and what they want to become famous for.

As you can see, setting goals is a real challenge, but remember how important it is to do is before you start creating. It gives everyone a clear ‘north star’ on why they are working on this project and what the bigger goal is. It also makes sure that subjectivity can be countered.

Here’s an example of why goals are handy to use. 2 weeks into the project a client mentions : “We need to also have all our projects and a blog on the website.” Suppose the goals was: “To create an experience that immerses our customers into the hotel in a fun and immersive way.” You could ask: do we think adding a blog will add to the immersive experience? The answer is obvious: No!

This article is written as part of a collaboration between HolaBrief and Let’s talk branding.

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