F*** the Format

For the past 7 years, I’ve worked in and around the creative industries as a designer, creative and innovation consultant. No matter where I’ve found myself, I’ve seen industry-standard tools like email, Slack and Trello have the impact of standardising our workflows. We adhere to the limitations of the tools that are available to us, whether that’s the A4 paper size, a 16:9 screen size or the Microsoft office suite. These specifications frame our outputs; technical limitations and project time constraints mean that we rarely challenge ourselves to break away from these conventions.

But what if we’ve become lazy? Are these templates limiting or stunting our creativity, our ability to communicate and to work to our fullest potential? Maybe.

Web Blind

Web design has entered into an age of ubiquity. Most sites are designed for mobile-first before considering desktop, tablets or other formats. So we have seen an emergence of long scrollable landing pages with jazzy hero images and blocks of text divided by images with stacks of illustrative icons. Logos are fixed and placed in the page header and the navigation is fixed in the top right. Sites are designed this way for a reason; UX and UI designers architect pages to optimise usability, so if the majority of your users are accessing information via their smartphones, then you’re limited by what can fit on their screens whilst remaining legible. The same can then be true when designing keynote presentations, online adverts or HTML emails.

So how can you celebrate creativity within these constraints? How can you challenge yourself and your organisation to push the limits of how you story-tell? When should you break the rules and f*** the format?

Challenging your format: Snack boxes

Last year, I was creative lead on a project with a global confectionary company. Over two and half weeks, we had the task of researching trending snacking habits within key demographics around the UK. With tight deadlines, limited resources and a large deliverable to research, collate, analyse and playback, the temptation was to switch to default: load PowerPoint, whip up some infographics, and have a couple of filmed testimonials in our back pocket ready for our playback with the client. This was not the case. I believe customer research should never feel transactional. We shouldn’t reduce our “users” to over-simplified personas, we should take every opportunity we have to add warmth and character to the output of our customer research.

So what could we do to challenge the format? I wanted to tell a rich story that would bring reality to the lives our customers, so that as our clients sat in a boardroom in the US, they could experience a small piece of their customers’ worlds. We visited British families in their homes and followed them on their weekly food shops. From the 100+ hours of footage we gathered, we synthesised the footage into individual ethnographic films to illustrate the themes and trends we had unearthed. This was a start, but we didn’t want the rich detail of their habits and context of their lives to get lost in translation in our delivery. We needed our clients to feel like they had been there with us. So we created snack boxes to support each of the films. Each box was filled to the brim with the biscuits, cakes, fruits, crisps, and other snacks that the customer’s reference in the films. The boxes acted an experiential support to our research and a valuable leave-behind, a reminder of the customers they are designing for, as well as an exhibition of our teams creativity, setting our way of working apart from our competitors.

Takeaways

If you take anything away from this story, it’s to challenge the format of your next project and embrace the unexpected:

1. Originality: At the beginning of a new project challenge yourself and your team to think about original formats for how you play the project back to your client.
2. Customer-centric design: You are probably already a champion of customer-centric design, so extend those values to your client too (because at the end of the day, your client is your customer!). Consider how you can hand over the project in a format that fulfils their needs and amplifies the messages you are trying to convey in a way that is understandable and useful to them.
3. Gimmicks: Avoid them. If you’ve come up with a fabulously creative idea that doesn’t enhance any part of your story and the format is going to make it difficult to access, share or comprehend your messaging, then scrap it.
4. Ubiquity: When a predefined format is the only option, look for every opportunity to add richness to the story you are telling. This could mean illustrations in a PowerPoint, anecdotes direct from customers, photos to contextualise research, or anything else that will enhance your clients’ understanding of your work.
5. Playfulness: What worked well with the snack boxes we created was they were fun. They invited our client to explore taste, touch and smell. Their format was playful and tactile, an opportunity to use all of the sense.

If you’d like to see ways we’ve helped companies and could help yours, take a look at our site: Fluxx.uk.com, subscribe to our newsletter and/or read the free download of our new book What we get wrong about people.

Fluxx is a company that uses experiments to understand customers, helping clients to build better products. We do product and service design at such a pace we transform the way organisations work. Atkins, National Grid, the Parliamentary Digital Service and the Royal Society of Arts.

If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy “7 things kickboxing taught me about innovation”, “Social media: A silent killer of innovation”, “The one where Friends teaches you how to be a great service designer”, “Six behavioural flaws that make us stupid around money” and “13 things we learned while designing a more democratic Houses of Parliament.”

For more visit our Medium page: https://medium.com/fluxx-studio-notes