Simplify Your Agency’s Design Process: Workflow

One of the greatest joys of running a design agency is getting to work on a wide variety of design projects for a wide variety of clients. With this joy comes a huge challenge- ensuring that every project that your design agency produces is of the highest quality.

With so many balls up in the air, there is a high chance that your agency is going to drop one ball or several, which leads to angry clients and a poor reputation. This is where a design process and a repeatable workflow come to your rescue.

This article will show you how to create a design process workflow that helps your agency deal with multiple projects while delivering excellent results consistently.

1. Reviewing the client brief

Most design projects live or die by how well the agency understands the client brief. The brief is a blueprint of what the client wants and they will use it to determine the success or failure of your agency’s final deliverable.

Bring the team members who will work on the project to the client meeting and ask the following questions:

• What message should the design convey?
• Are there any design preferences and/or references?
• What is the background of the company?
• Who is the target market?
• What is the timeline of the project?
• Who is the contact point for the client?

This information will act as the north star and your team should refer to it throughout the design process. Create a client intake form that all clients should fill out which will ensure that your team always has all the information it needs.

2. Research and discovery

The final deliverable starts taking shape as your team researches the client, the market landscape, and the target audience. Your team should gather information on:

●      The client: Understand the client’s history and culture. Look at their past designs and current design assets while noting themes, typography, and color schemes.

●      The competitor landscape: Examine the competitor’s designs and note any design trends or opportunities to bring in a fresh take that can make your client stand out.

●      The target audience: Dig deep into the problems, likes, wants, and needs of the target audience. How do they express themselves? What other designs do they like? It is also important to know their demographic details such as age, gender, location, and income level. 

Because research and discovery can be tiring and time-consuming, your team might be tempted to skip it. Create templates for each of the different types of research that your team has to do to make the process easier. Use this design process documentation guide to learn how to come up with the templates.

3. Brainstorming

Using the information in the client brief and what your team has gathered during research and discovery, it’s time to come up with some ideas. Encourage your team to come up with as many ideas as possible on how you can solve the design challenge creatively.

While not all ideas will be winners, your team will definitely come up with a few good ideas. Don’t forget to document your ideas in an idea bank so that you can refer back to them easily.

4. Sketching

Bring your winning ideas to life by sketching the different elements on paper. Create sketches of how the different design elements and the basic layout of your design will look like.

With the visuals of different ideas in hand, your team can then select a few ideas that represent the client brief and their research the best. These ideas move to the conceptualization stage.

5. Concept development

In this stage, your team can start designing. They will develop 3 to 5 different concepts that they came up with in step 4. Give your team the best design tools such as UXPin that make it easy for them to design, prototype, and collaborate in one place.

The number of choices presented to the client will depend on the type of project and what was agreed upon with the client. Once the concepts are complete, it’s time to present them to the client for feedback.

6. Client feedback

Present the concepts to the client either personally or on video. While presenting explain the rationale for each design decision and then ask for their feedback.

Use the client’s feedback to refine the chosen concept until it is perfect. Encourage your designers to also guide the clients on the design choices that will serve their needs the best.

7. Final delivery

Success! The project is complete and it’s time to hand over the design files to the client. It is good practice to ask for feedback from the client at this point so that your team can use it to further improve your design services.

Improve your design process with the best design tools

A simple design process workflow will help you deliver great design projects and scale your agency. UXPin is an all-in-one design tool that can be used in every step of your design process. It makes it easy for your team to design, create prototypes, and get client feedback. Simplify your design process by signing up for a free trial of UXPin today.

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