Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Kamie Robinson

You don’t need to know exactly what should be done, but you need to know where you want to go

For over 10 years I have been translating ideas into visuals for print and screens. I have worked on projects ranging from promo material for campaigns, to videos, to fine art, to websites. Sometimes I work solo and other times as a part of a team handling different aspects of ideation, production and distribution.

From my experience, something that makes or breaks a project or team is clarity about a project’s purpose, scope, and the desired outcomes. When a project definition is murky, every step of the process takes longer for a thoughtful person to navigate the ambiguity.

At times articulated visual descriptions and ambiguous terminology try to mask as purpose, but the reason for a project is not a description of what it should look like or how it should function.

A project’s visual and functional components are important to consider, but only after the purpose and goal is clearly defined. If you know exactly how you would like something to look or be done, make sure those you work with know that their role is purely production work.

Note that creative people like to be creative. Too much direction too often can make them feel more like minions than capable thinkers and doers. Yet no direction, or meaningless or ambiguous communication leads to unclear understanding and detours.

Clarity of purpose, scope and outcomes

When working with a creative team, if you can answer these questions before you approach them, your team will have a solid foundation to ideate and build on.

What is the purpose of the project?
Who are the customers, users or viewers?
Why should the they care?
What should be communicated?
What is the desired outcome?
What budget and resources are available?
What timeline and deliverables do you have in mind?

If you don’t have all the answers, start with what you know and answer each question as best as you can. Taking that step will illuminate areas to research, benchmark, discuss and refine.

Type out your project outline

Written answers and visual examples are a great guide to consult throughout the duration of a project. They will be helpful when writing user stories and will keep scope creep in check.

A simple example from a side-project I am working on:

The purpose of this project is to build an art-related SPA (single page application) where visitors can view and leave marks of some kind on the page. The underlying reason is because collaborative creation is a concept that interests me.
Site users will be people with access to the internet interested in looking at and contributing to digital art. There should be a low barrier to participate to encourage more people to do so.
Users and viewers should care because it is interesting to see what is contributed and how a page evolves.
Site instructions should be clearly communicated through minimal text and an intuitive user interface tested by target users prior to launch.
The desired outcome is that people will participate and share the site. This can be measured by quantifying contributions and tracking page shares. Target numbers will be defined later.
The budget is limited.
Resources available include the chosen tech stack — Mongo, Express, Node, React, CSS and Heroku — and people I can ask for a code review.
Timeline: Deploy Sept 1, 2017. Launch Sept. 5, 2017,
Deliverables: The primary deliverable is the SAP. The secondary is a blog post about some aspect of making it.

A note about clear communication

As you write and communicate, avoid words like “nice”, “pretty” and “interesting” as well as other subjective phrases like “something that looks good.” Those words and phrases mean different things to people making it hard to derive clear meaning from them. If you catch yourself using those words, ask yourself if you have enough information to be more specific. If you do, try to rephrase. If you can’t find the right words, consider using visual or aural examples and describe why each effectively conveys what you like about it.

A Tip for Working with Creatives was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A Tip for Working with Creatives

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