Don’t ever skip the post-mortem
I’ve been sitting here this rainy Saturday morning, sipping my coffee (shoutout Messenger Coffee Co.), and thinking random thoughts about my career to date. Not just the wild, winding path it has taken, but about little moments along the way that built up into big moments for work that would come. And I began to notice a pattern.
So much of what I do now—my approach to certain challenges, my method for completing given tasks, the “way” I do things, generally—is shaped by having done those things a different way in the past, regretting it, and making changes accordingly.
A quick aside here. You may be thinking to yourself, Yeah, that’s called “learning from your mistakes,” dude. But I think there’s a subtle difference in what I’m getting at, which is that we don’t have to wait for mistakes to drive change and (hopefully) improvement.
Sometimes we don’t screw something up. Sometimes we don’t receive negative client feedback. Sometimes things work out, despite our suboptimal process. But we can’t allow results to cover up gaps in how we got there.
…And sometimes we do screw something up. That’s true, too.
So much of what I do now is shaped by having done those things a different way in the past, regretting it, and making changes accordingly.
OK, so my aside wasn’t so quick after all. I’ll get back on track by providing some stream-of-conscience examples of moments in my own professional past that drove the review-regret-adjust cycle:
Skipping wireframes in the web design process
Once upon a time, in my role as a digital designer, we decided to run through a web design project for a client without doing wireframes—you know, to speed things up. We did a sitemap, got client approval on the pages and general outline of the content, and barreled ahead to high-fidelity mockups.
How did that go? Did it save time? Of course not. Our questions about general layout and page composition were met with concerns about font face and the stock photo we chose for the fourth image down on a page three levels deep in the navigation. And on. And on. And on.
So when the project was done, I looked back on it, evaluated our experience, and formally introduced low-fi, clickable wireframes (via Sketch and InVision) into our official web design process.
Going full lorem ipsum in our wireframes
Speaking of wireframes, I initially went hardcore minimalist for our approach. All grayscale, a standardized font across clients, no imagery or iconography of any kind…and no content. All copy was comprised of our old, mysterious friend, lorem ipsum.
Well, after a few rounds of client reviews, I realized the relentless nothingness was a lot for clients from non-design walks of life to take in and navigate. So, while I stood fast on the other aspects of our wireframe design, I tweaked our content approach to something I lovingly call “ pseudo-lorem.” I had us use real copy for headers throughout the wireframes, to act as signposts of sorts and help the client understand at a very high level the context of each section across the site. Body copy was still lorem ipsum, so that we didn’t get sucked into involving our copywriters and putting the content cart way, way ahead of the cart.
The slight change had a massive impact. Our wireframe revisions were sliced in half, and the client was far more bought-in to our direction as we moved on to mockups.
Introducing brand marks to clients in full-color digital form
In a similar vein, I structured our brand development process as creative director based largely on a couple early experiences I faced with clients prior to that process being in place. In those times, we spent all kinds of time in the early part of the process sketching, iterating, whittling down, digitizing, messing with type and layout of the lockups, and then replicating with different color combinations…before the client saw anything.
As you could probably guess, the result was generally a mess. We got feedback about spacing, font, color—everything…except the mark itself. That came when we thought we were almost finished.
Naturally.
So from that point on, we had a deliverable-based process in which we first showed actual raw sketches to get sign-off on our direction, followed by black-and-white digital versions of the finalists, color options, and lockups. All deliverables required client approval before we’d proceed to the next milestone.
The power of the post-mortem
I could go on, but this little write-up turned into a long ramble. So what’s my point here? I told you, I’m just sitting here, drinking coffee, and thinking, so what makes you think I had a point? 🤔
…Alright, I do have a point. My point is this:
Don’t skip the post-mortem. 👈
We’re in marketing, advertising, creative services, what have you. We move quickly. Our clients want things quickly. But more than that, they want things done well. And we’re doing a disservice to them, and to ourselves and the quality of our work, if we don’t take the time at the end of a project to look back on how things went—particularly at the pain points of the process. Focus on those points, and use your undoubtedly powerful and creative mind to diagnose the source of the pain so that you don’t experience it again and again.
Don’t skip the post-mortem.
If the idea of a post-mortem makes you imagine a corporate hellscape, designer, just think of it as a how-it-started-how-it’s-going Instagram post.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
