Understanding Your Own Creative Work Process, A How-To Guide

No matter the project, a strong creative process will ensure you deliver effective, high quality work for your clients. Regardless of the delivery environment, your process will see you through the most difficult of design challenges, assuming you have a solid grasp of what works for you and makes you an effective visual communicator.

Not only does a thorough creative process guide your creativity and exploration, it helps non-creatives understand your chosen approach and design decisions. This helps to maintain forward momentum and clear lines of communication as a project is developed, while sharing accountability between all team members.

Often you will see “how-to” process articles that focus solely on pen-to-paper iteration through to a final polished design. While it is very valuable information, I believe a designer’s process encompasses much more than mere visual exploration and iteration; it should paint a high-level picture from the absolute start of a project to the end, from initial planning through research, exploration, iteration, testing and final delivery, to post-project support – all of which play a major role in a project’s completion. Your process should not be limited to a specific step, but a holistic, thorough understanding of every factor that will determine your success as a designer and that of your work.

What follows is a very brief summary of my personal process, with an explanation of each major component involved. While every designer will have their own unique process, often we will share similar steps, if not the entire approach with only subtle differences.

This is written in the context of freelance client work, however, it is no different when you are part of a team or working for another company – your managers are your clients, and your creative process will still fully apply to your work.

Step 1 – Project Goals and Setting Expectations

When beginning a new project, there are several factors you must learn about and understand in order to ensure you are starting on the right foot, such as the various goals of the project and what is expected of you.

Sometimes your client will provide a design spec or document outlining their intentions, but it’s not always set in stone. With almost every project, the goals and factors defining the end work will shift and evolve as you move through the development process, and it’s helpful to break them down into several sub-categories and define them directly with your client. This is very high-level, and could easily be expanded on where necessary, but this initial step will provide you with a good foothold to start on,

What are the project goals?
The soul of the project, this is what you are aiming to create and deliver for your client in a nutshell – a statement about the essence of what is being worked on.

What are the design goals?
Specifically, what are the challenges that you need to overcome in order to accomplish the project goals? These may be artistic or aesthetic challenges through to localization issues with languages, or regional issues with cultural sensitivities, etc…

What are the client’s goals?
Your client will have an array of goals for you to accomplish. Those goals will typically include, but not be restricted to, both financial and marketing efforts.

What are your user’s requirements?
Understanding your audience is paramount to ensuring that you are achieving your goals with your work, and your efforts are focused on the right people. User requirements define the types of solutions you need to provide to your audience, and will shape the decisions you make throughout the project’s lifespan. Ensuring there is no confusion about these details between you and your client is vital

What is the timeline of the project?
The timeline is one of the most sensitive topics when dealing with a new project. It depends on the amount of time allotted by the client, and each chunk of the project needs to be plotted for accordingly. Keep in mind, it is often better to overestimate the time required and then over-deliver to your client than it is to underestimate and then under-deliver.

What are the technological requirements?
Often, clients will have a specific technological requirement for the work, for instance, delivering a website on a sustainable, easy-to-use content management system that they can update later. Additionally, part of the value you bring to the table is identifying and suggesting potential solutions to your clients.

Who is involved and what are the roles?
If your project involves the work of others, it is wise to understand exactly who else is contributing, what they are contributing, and what their roles are in the project. Not only will this help to eliminate overlapping efforts, but it will help to maintain communication between the right people.

Once all of this information has been gathered, you should have an intimate understanding of what is required of you, and exactly what the expectations are for each contributor. This information will act as a framework during each remaining step in your creative process, providing a guide for you to leverage from and ensure you are focused on the right areas of the project.

Step 2 – Research Driven Design and Inspiration

Now that you understand exactly what you need to deliver, you begin the initial ideation phase of your creative process: researching competition, identifying the good and bad, and becoming inspired.

With your project goals in mind, identify an array of competitors’ works that are both similar and innovative. While it would be best for most of these to be as similar to your project as possible, they do not all need to be. Consistency is good to keep in mind, but inspiration or design solutions will often come from unfamiliar areas or mediums entirely unrelated to your project. Collecting examples of others’ work provides you with a wide range of material to analyze and leverage from, so keep in mind that you should not avoid including bad or ineffective work in your research, as you are just as capable of learning from the mistakes of others as you are of being influenced by their successes.

The next step is to thoroughly analyze the key examples pulled from your pool of reference material; start by identifying the examples of work that are most successful, innovative or similar to your project. For each example, creating a competitive analysis document will help you break down each of the major design decisions the authors made throughout their work, while cataloguing the do’s and don’ts and design patterns you observe in each one. In turn, this allows you to create a master list of take-away features you may wish to incorporate into your early experimentation, while avoiding the pitfalls that others have experienced.

Competitive analysis documentation can be as intricate and detailed as you want it to be, or entirely simple and extremely brief – it all depends on the time you are willing to spend, given the project requirements you outlined earlier. Know that each time you go through the trouble of this research, it adds to your design repertoire and keeps you well rounded.

Research-driven work provides justification for your design decisions later, if you are able to show the successes and failures of certain features to your client early on. Especially when using competitors’ works, it will make it that much easier for you to take certain approaches with your own project and help the client understand why. It will also help further develop the more specific requirements of your project; by looking at the solutions provided by a competitor’s work, you may realize your project also requires a certain feature that was not identified earlier on.

Your research phase does not need to be limited to competitive analysis; it can be extremely valuable taking the time to include an overview of the fundamental design guidelines you plan to employ in your work. For instance, if you are developing a website with a high degree of interactivity, having an introduction and breakdown of web usability heuristics not only serves as a refresher for you, but it also helps to ensure your client has a clear understanding of your decisions.

Moving through the research process, you should try to collect as much inspirational material as possible from as wide a range of sources as possible, while documenting the initial ideas that spring into your head for later experimentation. How and where you get inspiration will be very specific to you as an individual designer. For example, I have personally found that image aggregation sites like ffffound and Abduzeedo are sources of fantastic, random design material.

At this point, you want to be ramped up on the project requirements, fired up to start designing, and confident in your focus for what lies ahead.

Step 3 – Experimentation and Exploration

Now is the time to make use of the research and inspiration collected in the previous step, and begin experimenting. Again, this stage of the process will be individual to you, whether you jot things in a book or on loose paper, move right to the computer, etc. The key is to get as many ideas down as possible, to not leave a single stone unturned in terms of potential ideas.
If you are not comfortable with sketching, start practicing. Sketching is an invaluable tool for you, and you should be keeping all of your sketches for your own future reference. You do not need to know how to draw in order to sketch, but often you will need to sketch in order to visually articulate the ideas in your head.

Constantly seek out additional inspiration and reference material – it doesn’t stop at step 2. Take direction from the work of others, those you look up to, and the work that you hold in high regard. If you have a eureka moment and find the perfect solution, make sure you move past it, keep going and then come back to it as you refine your ideas later.

If you are building an interactive system, paper prototyping is a fast, cheap, and effective way of mapping out an entire system, and then iterating on it without fear of lost work or effort. As you work with prototypes, the granularity of the design goals will increase and become more refined, and having a mocked up system which you can navigate through, albeit manually, will reveal additional requirements you need to provide solutions for, or features that were missing in the initially outlined requirements.

One of the fundamental mantras of effective interactive design is ‘Fail early, fail often’. This means that through your early experimentation and prototyping, the idea is to flesh out as many different concepts and approaches as possible, while eliminating the insufficient designs as often as you can. Because you are utilizing prototyping techniques that require no implementation effort, there is no lost effort, as you do not need to rebuild anything. It is far easier and more cost-effective to allow time for this process than it is to implement an early design only to have it fail and force you back to the drawing board.

When you have reached the point where your prototype is fulfilling all of the project requirements, a functional mockup is your next, best bet for moving forward. Similar to the paper prototype, the functional mockup will allow you to rapidly analyze your approach to the project, identify missing components and features, and get a sense of what the end-user’s experience will be like when interacting with the system.

Regardless of what you are working on, the key is to iterate as rapidly as possible, weeding out the bad ideas while making use of the effective ones. Ensure you get fresh eyes on your work, especially as you transition from exploration to refinement, and do not limit feedback to just designer-types – focus more on your target audience if you can, as they are the ones you’re reaching out to through your work.

Step 4 – Identifying the Strongest Concepts

After generating a slough of different approaches for your project, you need to identify the strongest concepts for further refinement. This is a critical step for a number of reasons:

- By identifying the strongest concepts, you create a lineup of proposed solutions for the project, which allows you to keep the project moving forward. If you have a sign-off process with your client, then this allows them to have input on a few choice designs.

- Focusing on only a few designs allows you more freedom to adjust and polish them, which becomes increasingly more time-consuming the further along you are in the project.

- You do not want to allow your client to peruse through your endless array of rapidly mocked up concepts, as this will often stall the project and may pigeonhole you into an ineffective design that the client simply ‘likes’. Remember that they are hiring you for your expertise, your eye for design, and your experience, which means that you will bring them a choice selection of a few unique concepts, each with their own merits, to discuss.

The process for actually identifying the strongest concepts should incorporate feedback from your peers, if at all possible – either fellow designers or those fluent with the type of project you are working on. One professor I had at university would tape his lead concepts to the wall in front of his bed, jump up in the middle of the night and stare at them. He maintained that this gave him a fresh perspective on the different designs, which is something that’s easy to lose as you work on each one. Whatever works for you, your goal should be to move the project from wide experimentation to focused execution.

2 to 3 key approaches should be sufficient for most projects. While some clients will insist on more, others will be happy with a single approach; you will need to tailor your process for the situation.

For interactive work, you may be going through this process in a few different areas: the aesthetic design, the system model, and the structure of the navigation, for instance. As a result, you may be experimenting less with the more involved areas, and in turn decide on fewer approaches to further develop. Additionally, functional mockups will become more complex and begin to be fancified or ‘arted up,’ helping to further define what the end-user experience is going to be. This process itself leads to further iteration, but it’s important to try and stay within the chosen design approaches whenever possible. Testing your system is just as critical now as ever, and the ‘fail early, fail often’ mantra still applies, if not in spades.

Once you have your strongest concepts, it’s time to review with your client and allow for their feedback. From there you will decide on the final, key approach, and move on to refinement.

Step 5 – Finalizing Your Approach

At this point you have thoroughly established and helped guide the requirements for the project, presented a firm idea of what you are intending to deliver, and developed an appropriate array of chosen concepts to work with. By now, through iteration and experimentation in the previous steps, you should have gained a solid understanding of the merits of each concept, and settling on a key design approach is integral to continuing the process.

You will now want to settle on a final, chosen approach, and fully develop that design, often integrating key elements of the un-chosen alternatives. Feedback from your colleagues can help substantially with this step, as well as user feedback from your actual target audience. Your client will also help shape the final direction;if you have been keeping them abreast of your overall process, they should be aware of the decisions you have made prior to this point.

The chosen design should be fleshed out and polished to fill every requirement outlined for the project, with all materials being developed as cleanly and efficiently as possible; keep your final working files neat and organized, in case you or someone else needs to come back to them – it will avoid a major headache.

As you implement a final design for an interactive system, continue to test your progress to ensure the design maintains optimum usability and continues to meet the project requirements. If you have stuck with your process step-by-step, there should not be any major surprises here, short of the requirements of the project changing radically outside of your own control (which, unfortunately, can happen with little notice).