The majority of designers have to start their design work before receiving copy or customer data. And yet the design is, along with the copy, expected to solve the clients’ problems. Working with a data-driven design process is a helpful way of working when making design decision.
A couple of weeks ago I listened to Oli Gardner at Webbdagarna Stockholm. What he presented has since then stuck with me. According to Oli, marketing is broken. Marketers, designers and copywriters don’t work together in an optimized way and do not use data to start off the project. 81% of designers have to start their design work before they receive the copy, and 62% of designers receive no customer data at the start of a marketing campaign. So the designer starts designing with Lorem ipsum and hands over to the copywriter, that will have issues fitting the copy in the design. Not effective and frustrating for both parties.
So, what to do? You become a data-driven company. A data-driven organisation should:
- Be curious
- Care about how it is on the other side – If you can’t feel the client’s problem you can’t solve it for them.
- Be evidence based – Research, get data.
- Design for your ideal customer, not just any customer
- Work with the full lifecycle – Go through every faze and optimize every one.
- See the next step – Create a semantic design/experience that matches the content inside.
Start projects with everyone involved and make sure everyone is data-informed. Gather the marketer, the copywriter and the designer and look at the data from the client’s previous campaigns, their different channels, find out what wording, word count, colours, use of photos or illustration, page length, number of CTA’s etc. that works best to get the conversion for this specific client. The data can tell you where the conversion is already good and where you would have to make an effort. Have then the designer and copywriter to start at the exact same time.
Oli had a lot of fun examples to explain how to work with a data-driven design process, and I can recommend investing 45 minutes having a look at Oli’s session on YouTube