🫥 HOW & WHY, but not WHAT.

I do a fair amount of overseeing product design during the workday (as well as doing it myself).

And, I was just thinking about how there’s one thing that is absolutely CRITICAL, but often MISSING.

…It’s CONTEXT.

CONTEXT is everything. And CONTENT is everything.

They teach you the HOW & WHY of product design in school…but not the WHAT.

The WHAT is important...the WHAT is critical! The WHAT…is the point of even having a product!

Omg, what is Cathy going off about now? Has she lost it?

I mean, “losing it” would imply I had “it” to start with, but let’s stay focused.

Here’s an example so you can see what I mean:

Myself and my team were embroiled in this gigantic redesign of a product with hundreds of catalog items and more than 6,000 pages, right? I won’t say of what.

There were vendors, many internal teams, stakeholders all the way up to the top. Probably more than 150 people were working on this product update. A lot of pieces had to be completed by external teams.

And during the actual “design phase”…the project would go a little something like this:

We’d see a design for a component on its own from one of the vendors....

Like, A video player. Or maybe a “card” that could be set to display a gallery of photos.

And it’d look BEAUTIFUL! It would look like HOT SHIT from a UI perspective.

All the little interactions and button states would be well-thought-through.

BUT….

…It’d be absolutely f*cking IMPOSSIBLE for anyone to approve it.

• From a STRATEGY perspective, we didn’t know how it would fit into the big picture goals of the product update.

• From a CONTENT perspective, we didn’t know how we’d be able to editorialize around it or how it would fit into the bigger picture of all the other content.

• From a GRAPHICS perspective, we didn’t know if we’d need to slice brand new versions of every piece of art for every catalog item for the next 6 months because the component created a bunch of weird safe areas.

See what I mean about context and content?

We're talking about product design right now, but this could be literally any niche or discipline within creative.

Look, we got through it. We worked together with the content and strategist teams to sew the disparate components together into pages with the real images and copy that'd actually be in the page. Only then would be able to “see” things like “oh shit, this video player needs to have a link back to the landing page when it’s being shared outside of this page, which is probably going to happen all the time.”

It’s so important to research what your client is ACTUALLY working with and test with THAT in your design — not some made up placeholder asset that looks perfect at all angles. All that does is look pretty in your portfolio — it’s not functional for the brand’s needs. Additionally, a note specific to product designers: component-centric design is GREAT for dev teams, but TERRIBLE for getting buy-in from stakeholders. You need to also be able to show a stakeholder a "page" with all the things on it (preferably annotated). You have to be prepared to do both.

The good news? Bringing context to a project doesn’t cost you anything and doesn’t require a special skill set — it only requires research and documentation. And it’s such an excellent way to demonstrate your leadership ability.

Where can you bring the context this week?

Bye for now.

XOXO,

Cathy

P.S. I had an epic Save the Darlings session — check it out. Just EIGHT more days left!