Life is a succession of projects but having the ability to pick the right ones is as important as fulfilling a project itself. After all, nobody wants to waste time and effort on something that may not make any difference. So what does it take to produce work that matters?
Do I know my audience?
“Know thy user” is a common expression in design. In other words, it means get to know the people you seek to serve. We usually do it through research. The research phase is key to understand the scope of a project but more importantly it allows us to know the targeted audience and their relationship or behaviour towards a specific problem. It generates valuable data however what’s collected can become obsolete if we actually don’t look for the right people. So who should we seek to serve?
Start with your tribe
It is common for organisations to carry out projects with the sole purpose of expanding their market reach and obtain new clients. Getting more clients often means getting more revenue and the shareholders will certainly be pleased. However, I would argue that the amount of people we try to reach isn’t always an accurate reflection of the quality of our work and focusing on the big numbers rather than a small and targeted audience won’t guarantee better results. In fact, we should spend more time knowing our existing clients to advance our cause.
Those people already took the time to get to know our brand, our products and understand the message we ought to convey – they belong to our tribe. Those individuals would vouch for us and pass on our message to their friends, family, colleagues. In other words, they are responsible for selling our brand. Our tribe members hold the valuable data we need to build a coherent research. Instead, we often focus on the unknown audience, the one that hasn’t bought into us, yet we want to please them so desperately that we would alienate ourselves and our existing clients to gain a few pennies.
We can make research even more relevant by seeking to understand those who already believe in us.
I got 99 problems
Now we face a choice, one that will decide the angle from which we are going to serve people. We found our audience, they have problems. There can be many of them so how many shall I try to resolve?
There isn’t a straight answer to that question but the less the better and here is why. If we try to solve everything, it means adding more variables, more case studies, expanding the amount of people we look to help, and we just end up losing focus on what really matters. We no longer try to help a specific audience but again we merely try to please everyone.
The truth is our work can build traction if it resonates with people and adds values to them. We cannot make everyone resonate with our projects, so we need to sacrifice and choose carefully who we want to serve. Using a persona can really help with this process. It allows you to embody the targeted audience and build a real understanding of their needs and goals. The best personas are the ones that focus on specific problems so give it two or three pain points and base your solutions around those.
Just ship it
The full design cycle has been completed. The project is coming to an end, here we are ready to launch a new product and press the “send” button. We believe we solved a problem but wait…it’s not perfect yet! Let’s review again.
We want to share the best possible product but how perfect does it have to be?
We all know that the “perfect” product doesn’t exist so I would argue that perfectionism is a way of hiding from shipping work that matters. We can spend a lifetime perfecting and improving something but getting stuck on details merely stops us from shipping creative work. My writing is far from perfect, yet I still ship it. I do spend time correcting spelling mistakes and perfecting my grammar, yet I don’t wait until it is completely polished to send it to you.
Perfectionism makes you polish while others don’t care about the polishing. In reality, perfectionism merely exposes our fear of criticism. We don’t want to be put on the hook, so we ought to have all the answers and dwell on the smallest details. We forget about the bigger picture and the problem we aimed to solve, we push the release date again and someone else has turned up with a better solution. Our product is no longer relevant.
Don’t be mistaken, I do not promote unfinished or flawed products. In fact, I would want the highest standards for my product however it is worth noting that organisations that play the “perfectionism” card only try to avoid criticisms and deprive their audience from receiving creative work that can make a positive change.
