Notes from the Future Desk: April
By:
Jerrod Long
on 5/2/2016
This month the Future Desk is brought to you by VIA’s design team. Design goes beyond mockups and graphics – our designers are constantly working with clients to make their vision and ours a reality. With a focus on prototyping, documentation, and setting expectations we’re delving into the nuts and bolts of client relations.
Design

Week 1: Prototypes help the client envision
Week 2: Setting Expectations
Presentation and setting up a client’s expectations are things they don’t really teach you in school, but are probably the most important part of the design process. You can have an award-winning idea, but if you can’t sell it, the world will never see it. This week we set up a presentation to the client by telling them the range of emotions they might feel during the workshop: confusion, excitement to contribute, frustration with team members, etc. Once they knew what to expect out of our journey, they were able to more comfortably position their input. Which led to a fantastic outcome.
Week 3: Documentation is vital
At VIA, we use a few tools to help everyone stay on the same page creatively. The most important of these are Brand Guidelines, Creative Brief, and for digital projects, UX Brief. All three of these documents add a bit of time to the front end of a project, but save immense amounts of time when you’re deep in it. However, these documents have to have meaning or they are useless. Make them meaningful and refer to them often.
Week 4: Prototypes part deux
Piggy-backing on Kelly’s theme of prototyping, this month I did a little digging to try and discover an ideal tool for prototyping ⦠Which yielded mixed results.

QOTM
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