The Process

Our Approach to Digital Design Strategy

At Drexler, designing and building digital platforms is our focus. Whether it’s an ecommerce site for a growing retailer, an interactive experience for a museum, or a key piece of a new brand launch, everything we create has to be based on a solid strategy.

You may be asking, why can’t you just design something that looks nice and call it a day? The short answer is that if it’s not based on a real business problem and a real user need, it’s not going to do anything more than look nice.

Our process has evolved over the years and will continue to do so. We also adapt it based on each project’s needs. With that said, this is what our typical process looks like now.

(Note: For the purposes of this post, we are going to assume we have already chosen a platform and ironed out the technical requirements. Obviously, that is a critical piece, but won’t be the focus of this post.)

Gather As Much Information As Possible

Most projects begin with an RFP, brief, or some delivery of basic information from the client. This document will inevitably mention issues with the current site like it’s too hard to update, the look is outdated, it no longer serves our needs, etc.

Whenever we’re reading documents like these, we’re trying to look beyond these basics and determine what the real issue is. What’s the unpasteurized version of the problem?

We’re not going to figure that out through emails. Our client engagements begin with in-person kick-off meetings with the full team involved. We want to meet everyone on the client’s side, and include everyone who will be part of the project on our end – project managers, strategists, designers, and developers.

We also know that not everything can be figured out sitting in a conference room. We want to see how our clients work and how customers experience their products. When we began working with Ceremony Coffee, we spent time in their roastery, their coffee shops, and participated in workshops like their best customers do. This gave us an understanding we wouldn’t have gotten in any meeting.

Next, we want to listen to anyone who will talk. Getting to know our clients and their challenges is important. Getting to know their customers is equally important. This is where interviews come into play.

Additionally, we dig into current site analytics to see what’s hiding in those numbers and bar charts. Often, we’ll find patterns showing where users fall off or run into dead ends. We’ll also look at what keywords are driving traffic to help illuminate users’ motivations.

It’s also important that we not focus so narrowly on our specific client that we miss the bigger picture. Economic and societal trends, outside research, and learnings from adjacent industries and past work shape the way we approach each project.

Once we’ve collected all of this information, we start outlining our most important questions.

Define the Big Questions

The strategy will only be as good as the questions we ask. Most of them aren’t going to focus on the final product, but on the organization and the people they’re speaking to. Once we understand this, we’ll have a much better idea of how to make the product work for them. A few of the questions we find ourselves asking often:

• Who is the client and what makes them special?
• What are their organization-wide goals?
• What’s standing in their way?
• Who is the audience?
• What is shaping how this audience thinks about us (if they think of us at all)?
• What is motivating them to engage with us?
• How has our client communicated to them in the past?
• Who else is talking to our audience and what are they saying?
• What’s happening in culture that’s relevant to our client and this audience?
• How can we bring something unexpected yet valuable to our audience?
• What should this look like?

Focus on the Ideas That Can Make a Difference

Once we’ve done this investigating, we’ll usually come up with a handful of interesting points. These could be quotes, notes or ideas that feel like they might be something. What we’re looking for is anything that changes how we think about the problem.

When we began working with the Chrysler Museum of Art, we took a trip down to Norfolk. In an Uber on the way to our first meeting, we asked the driver what she knew about the museum. Her response was that she had heard great things about the museum, the collection, and the people there, but had never made a point of actually visiting.

That conversation stuck with us and made us wonder where the disconnect was. The museum had a good reputation locally, but not enough people were walking through the doors. It turned out that even though the Chrysler is a very welcoming place, lots of people have their own museum baggage. They think of museums as stuffy, boring or not for them. So, one of our first challenges was to help people overcome this perception and show them the Chrysler was different.

This understanding helped shape the way we designed the site, and the content we created.

Bring It All Together

Now it’s time to narrow our thinking and hone in on the key insight that will guide us. Ideally, this is a succinct point that says something meaningful about the problem we are facing, the potential future we see, and how we will make this goal a reality. This thinking is then used to shape content, visuals and functionality.

For most of our projects, the content plan is presented as a detailed written outline instead of wireframes. We’ve found this format to provide all the necessary details without being too prescriptive in terms of layout. The main challenge here is including all of the information users need in a way that intuitively guides them through the site without overwhelming or confusing them.

As mentioned early on, it’s important to us that everyone on our team is involved throughout planning and not just handed a brief. Since the designers and developers have been part of this process, we often get to visual and interactive ideas sooner. While our clients aren’t necessarily expecting it now, sometimes early visuals and prototypes help explain the ideas in ways words can’t.

With our thinking detailed and a plan in place, we’re ready to present this work to our client.

Share Our Findings

Since we’ve been talking with our client and their team this whole time, this part feels less like a big reveal and more like part of the dialogue. We divide our discovery into a few sections:

• Our point of view on the client’s business and its biggest challenges
• A clear view of their audience
• A distillation of the most important things we need to communicate
• An establishment of guiding principles that will help us achieve our goals
• Initial visuals that translate these ideas to something tangible

The process doesn’t always look the same, but we know we’ve done it well if it gives us:

• A better understanding of the current situation
• An agreed-upon way to judge design beyond “like it” or “don’t like it”
• A team that is aligned and moving in the same direction
• Initial ideas for visuals to gauge if we’re on the right track
• A stronger client-agency relationship then when we started

Every project has its own challenges. However, we’ve found that if we invest the time upfront, we can find and overcome most of them early in the process. As digital gets increasingly commoditized, it’s more important than ever for design studios to bring clients thoughtful, creative strategy that leads to websites and digital platforms that are not only beautiful, but help build their businesses.