What’s a design roadmap and why do you need one?

A design roadmap is a strategic, living artifact that sets the direction for a web design team’s professional work.

Our roadmaps are basically meant to act as a single source of the truth to help the joint client / Productive Machine team align around the strategic vision, user experience, task completion and service goals, visual creative, and editorial styles that will drive the client’s new website.

We start by engaging stakeholders from across the client organization in a series of collaborative workshops, to obtain direct input on the site’s future design and functionality. There are two main components we touch on in this process:

• VISUAL DESIGN
  • Our visual design workshop is the highlight of every site redesign assignment. Touching on a multivariate range of 15 creative characteristics, a review of competitor sites, and also of sites from completely outside the client’s industry, this exercise turns out even the quietest, least engaged client-side execs to be invested in direction-setting.

• INFORMATION / EDITORIAL DESIGN
  • Information’s part of design too. We’re big believers in using purposeful, systematic methods to help our clients’ target audiences to understand exactly what we want them to know. A resource that’s been invaluable to us has been Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less. If you happen to become a Productive Machine client, you can expect to receive a copy from us early in our relationship. In short, the Smart Brevity “formula” is a communication style that emphasizes delivering key information concisely by using a strong headline, a single clear opening sentence (the “lede”), providing context with a “why it matters” element, and offering the option to “go deeper” with additional details for those who want more information; basically prioritizing the most important point and delivering it in a readily digestible format. We encourage you to take a minute to listen to this TEDx Talk by Jim VandeHei, who co-created both Axios and Politico prior to authoring Smart Brevity.

It’s all about creating a shared mental model between the client and our team. By agreeing to our mutual desired outcomes from the start, we create an environment in which anyone, anywhere across the organization can not only get from A to B without crashing, but can glance back at the roadmap anytime and clearly recall the strategic vision for the new site, and how we got here.

Design roadmaps are a phenomenal 360-degree accountability tool.