Thought process behind design

We are working on building one interesting product for one of our client where we are taking care of everything : Design, web, backend, front-end, mobile development and have flexibility of choosing our own technological stack.

This article is mainly focused on importance of sharing thought process behind your design with the client.

So, we had our first iteration of designs for the Web part of the product from our design team who is working remotely. We were happy with the options design team has shared and were eager to get it confirmed and have feedbacks as early as possible from the client to get things rolling on the development side. But!! Is it ok just to share the links of the design options with the client and wait for feedbacks on mail? The answer is no. But, we did that because it was late night and we were not sure of getting connected with client on urgent basis.

Our design team insisted us to get on call with the client as it was the first design iteration we were sharing. It is very important for the client to understand the though process of the designer that went into the design process related to why the color theme is the way it is or why the font size is small, why the panels on left and right are of the same width and many more factors that designer might have thought of for creating the designs/mocks. So, we tried to get on a call with client and luckily all the team members were available to get on a quick call for design discussion.

And on the call we realized how important it was to have that brainstorming session on design with the client. He was very happy with the options we shared and gave some good suggestions. Overall it was a very fruitful call and we were on roll for the next step ahead.

Take Aways:

  • Discuss the thought process behind design with the client instead of just sharing it and going back and forth with feedbacks and more iterations. Once design and theme is finalized it is ok to share minor updates on design for new modules.
  • Have few options and invest effort only on things that are mandatory to be confirmed first. For e.g it is not required to create design for entire product and all responsive devices in first iteration. Once colour theme and approach is confirmed for the web design, we can go ahead with creating mocks for other screen sizes.
  • Treat design process as one of the important part of your product and always keep in mind user experience and behaviour while designing.

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