Dear (none)Designer,
Welcome back to the fifty-eight Design at Scale™ Newsletter – where we explore innovation and how design sparks real change in large organisations and agencies.
Designers often need key insights, evidence, and analysis from their teams to make informed, effective design decisions.
From an organisational viewpoint, designers rely on input from client services, research, strategy, marketing analysis, and QA engineers to understand the full picture of the design challenge.
Regrettably, designers need to play the role of Sherlock and Holmes in order to determine how users utilise the existing platform, how frequently they access it, how long they stay on each page, where they are most likely to click, and other key metrics.
An informed designer, equipped with the right information, can make better decisions and deliver results faster. This means not only reflecting the brand through UI, but also solving real user problems by understanding the full context from the start.
By requesting information in a structured format—such as briefs, project identification documents, or requests for proposal—we ensure that all necessary insights are combined to inform the proposition we're building.
In reality, designers often report that briefs are empty, previous design screenshots are too low resolution, analysis is missing, and deadlines are too tight to allow for thorough understanding.
If you support the design team as a project manager, product owner, business analyst, quality engineer, or administrative assistant, you can help by sharing the most relevant information in a clear, accessible way.
Providing essential information upfront ensures the design team can work efficiently, produce high-quality results, and spend less time searching for crucial answers. Effective information sharing is key to accelerating and improving design work.
After all, it’s not so difficult:
- What problem are we solving
- When it needs to be delivered
- Will be delivering
- What we delivering
- How do we test it?
- Do we have customer data?
- Do we have a previous analysis?
- Are we working side by side with the engineers?
- Do we have a basic artefact, such as brand guidelines, colour palette, photography, iconography, and any additional artefacts needed for delivery?
10. Who is a single point of contact?
11. Who is making decisions?
For more information, please visit Designa at Scale™ – GRID Magazine, where you can find additional relevant articles that explore high-performing teams, self-organising teams of 001, teams of 010, and teams of 100 that deliver the value proposition within a product-led environment.
