Strategic Design Planning

Whether you are creating performance creatives or creatives for an ATL campaign, while writing briefs you must always understand the current awareness state of your consumers At any point of time, a potential consumer who is in-market for your category can be classified under one of the following -         Not Problem Aware -         Problem Aware -         Solution Aware And each of these will warrant a different creative If you have a truly innovative product and trying to solve a problem which most people aren’t even aware of, most of the time will have to go in making people aware of the problem and then link your solution to the problem If most of your potential consumers are problem aware but don’t know what the solution is, you have to start a bit with the problem and then introduce your brand/product as the solution. For new innovations, the best place to start is if a good chunk of the consumers are already problem aware If there are already existing solutions in the market and most of your potential consumers are already solution aware, your focus must be on highlighting why your solution is better than everything else in the market. It might mean lot of product comparisons and answering all potential barriers to purchase When we started selling BLDC fans in 2015, most people were problem aware. High electricity bills was a problem. The inconvenience of getting up to change speeds was a problem. But they didn’t know that BLDC fans could solve it. So, a lot of our focus was around highlighting that BLDC fans save electricity and bring a lot of convenience with remotes But over the last 3-4 years, more than 10 brands entered the category. And all of them were also heavily advertising. By now, a good chunk of people were solution aware and knew that BLDC fans can solve their problems of high electricity bills. And so a lot of our digital communication moved to highlight how our BLDC fans were better, and also on things which are over and above just energy efficiency. We started highlighting our smart features, innovative designs etc. as plain vanilla BLDC was now a commodity This is a very simple yet strong framework that can guide communication strategy for brands and products of all sizes

Why do so many communicators lose their audience? Often, it’s because we try to share everything. When communicating a complex project, whether it’s a new product feature, a design sprint, or a strategic pivot, we often see broadcasting ideas into the world as our goal. We want to show every wireframe, every debated nuance, and every data point we collected along the way. But our brains are not wired to absorb a stream of disconnected information. When we overwhelm our audience, we increase their cognitive load and quickly lose their attention. Our goal should be to make sure our audience understands. The antidote is structure. Structure acts as a psychological roadmap. It guides both the speaker and the listener through a clear, reasoned journey. On the Think Fast Talk Smart: The Podcast, I often talk about the importance of packaging ideas so they are easy to follow and easy to remember. One framework I often recommend for complex projects is what I call the 5P structure. It helps presenters walk their audience through a clear progression of ideas so the story behind the work is easy to understand. 1) Problem: Define the issue at hand 2) Process: Shaping your thinking 3) Proposal: Outlining the solution 4) Proof: Sharing the potential impact 5) Progress: Pointing forward Instead of overwhelming people with information, the structure guides them through the challenge you were solving, how you approached it, what you designed, the evidence behind it, and what comes next. When people can clearly follow the story, they are far more likely to trust the idea and help move it forward.

💡How to run a design audit A design audit is a comprehensive evaluation of a product's user interface, functionality, and overall design. A design audit is like a magnifying glass for your product's visual and functional language. It helps you understand if your product design is rock-solid. A design audit isn't a nice-to-have; it's essential for any brand that wants to stay ahead of its competitors. Key components of design audit: ✔ Information architecture analysis. Good IA maximizes the chances that your content is organized in a way that's easy to navigate and makes sense. ✔ User flow analysis. Understand how users move through your product. Identify the bottlenecks and dead ends, and then smooth them out for an excellent UX. ✔ Visual design assessment. Review typography, colors, and icons to ensure they're easy on the eyes and consistent with your brand. ✔ Heuristic evaluation. Heuristic evaluation is a process of examining the usability and accessibility of a product using these principles. https://lnkd.in/dJSw2KyH ✔ Performance evaluation. Test your product's speed and responsiveness to ensure users don't have to wait while using your product.  ✔ Accessibility evaluation. Ensure everyone can use your product. Your product should follow guidelines like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Practical tips for running a design audit:  ✔ Decide what you're auditing. Define the scope of your audit. Are you auditing a certain component, such as the sign-up form or the entire account creation flow? The scope of your audit should match with your goal.   ✔ Screenshot everything you come across during an audit and record videos of the most important user flows and processes. It will make it easier to reference design in your work and document it for others. ✔ Review everything you've captured to recognize patterns & identify inconsistencies. When looking closely at your design, you can notice that some elements with the same function are designed differently.  ✔ Document your findings. Even if you're not planning to share your findings with your team right away, it's worth starting documenting your findings as soon as possible. By doing that, you minimize the chances of missing important details. 📖 Guides: ✔ A guide to conducting a design audit (by Romina Kavcic)  https://lnkd.in/dDSb7tsf ✔ Auditing design systems for accessibility, slide deck (by Anna Cook, M.S.) https://lnkd.in/dX7jNMiw 🔨 Tools: ✔ Design audit template for Figma (by Shams)  https://lnkd.in/dUnFB_we ✔ Design audit template for Figma (by Romina Kavcic)  https://lnkd.in/d4u5gMBa 🖼 Visual design assessment by Shams #designsystem #designsystems #UI #uidesign #audit #visualdesign

Your “strategy” is probably just a calendar. I’m starting a 4-week series on the comms documents everyone confuses. First up: the biggest mix-up of all. Most “communication strategies” I see aren’t strategies. They’re plans wearing strategy’s clothes. Here’s the difference. A COMMUNICATIONS STRATEGY IS: ✅ Long-term direction (Where are we going?) ✅ A positioning framework (How do we want to be perceived?) ✅ Narrative architecture (What story are we building over time?) ✅ Audience intelligence (Who matters most and why?) ✅ Strategic choices (What we say yes to and what we say no to) It answers: What are we trying to achieve through communication - and why does it matter? A COMMUNICATIONS STRATEGY IS NOT: ❌ A content calendar ❌ A list of channels and tactics ❌ An activity log (12 posts, 4 newsletters, 2 reports) ❌ A campaign brief ❌ Execution timelines Those belong in your communications plan - which we’ll cover next week. WHY THIS CONFUSION COSTS YOU When you mistake a plan for a strategy, your team stays busy but not aligned. - Campaigns feel disconnected. - Leadership can’t see how comms drives mission outcomes. - Messaging shifts with every new project. Strategy is your compass. A plan is your roadmap. Without strategy, a plan just helps you move faster in the wrong direction. 5 QUESTIONS EVERY STRATEGY MUST ANSWER If your “strategy” can’t answer these, it’s probably a plan: 1️⃣ What change are we trying to create? (Not what we’re announcing - what we’re shifting) 2️⃣ Who must believe or act differently? (Your priority audiences - not everyone) 3️⃣ What’s our core narrative? (The through-line that connects everything we say) 4️⃣ How do we want to be positioned? (In the minds of donors, partners, beneficiaries, policymakers) 5️⃣ What are we NOT doing? (Strategic clarity requires strategic sacrifice) If you can answer these clearly - and your team agrees - you have a strategy. If you can’t, you have a to-do list. No judgment. Most organizations are in the same place :) But now you know what to build. Be honest: Is yours a strategy or a plan?

A communications strategy isn't a document that explains how communications works. Most of them read that way. And that’s the mistake. They read like you’re going on an information tour: Here's what you do, here's how you do it, here are the channels, here's the team. Very informative. Very easy to file away and never open again. Very easy for executives to dismiss as “thanks, next.” What a communications strategy actually does, when it's built right, is build a relationship. Between the function and the business goals it was built to advance (note I didn’t say business areas). Between the communications leader and the executives who need to trust their judgment before the crisis hits, before the decision gets made, and before the budget conversation starts. That relationship doesn't happen because you explained your work well. It happens because you've made your thinking visible, gotten alignment on it, and built a regular practice of showing how your decisions connect back to what everyone agreed on. That's what changes how you're perceived. Not the document. The relationship the document creates. What would change if your executive team was actually aligned on your strategy?

Designers love to run audits and surface UX issues. But most audits stop at surface-level stuff. Missing hover states. Inconsistent spacing. Odd button labels. That is not a UX audit. That is a UI roast. And it is usually ignored. If you want to be taken seriously, your audit has to tie directly to the business. Don’t just point out broken things. Show the cost of leaving them broken. If a button is hard to find, how many users fail to complete the flow? If the onboarding feels like a wall of text, what is the drop-off rate on that screen? If the checkout flow is a maze, how much revenue is lost every week? Anchor your points to the metrics that matter. Retention. Conversion. Activation. Time to value. That is where decisions happen. That is where priorities shift. Let’s say you spot friction in a settings flow and your analytics show a 30% drop-off before users even complete setup. If those users are paying $50 a month, and your app loses 100 of them a year from that broken flow, that is $60,000 a year in churn. And that is a conservative estimate. Now take that same flow and apply it across three different segments. What is the impact on enterprise users? What about your freemium tier? What does churn look like over 18 months? Suddenly, your messy dropdown isn’t just a UX flaw. It is a line item in the revenue report. That is how you make design unavoidable. No one argues with a number tied to dollars. No one shrugs off churn backed by Mixpanel events and LTV calculations. Designers want influence. This is how you earn it. Stop handing your team a list of opinions. Start handing them a list of prioritized opportunities backed by numbers. You are not just cleaning up pixels. You are optimizing the experience around how people actually behave. You are shaping how users experience value. That is the ROI of design. #roiofdesign #uxaudit #productdesign #designstrategy #conversiondesign #growthdesign

"You asked 100+ questions while auditing?" 🤯 Someone recently asked me this during a conversation about one of our projects. Let me take you behind the scenes 👇 A few months ago... We at Bigbrackets were hired as product design consultants to revamp an existing web portal in the Fintech domain. The product? ✔️ Feature-rich ✔️ Multi-level user roles (6–7 types) ✔️ Strong technical foundation ✔️ Functionality was smooth But when we conducted a UX audit, we uncovered a different story. The Real Issues? While the app worked technically well, it had: 🚫 Poor UX structure 🚫 Missing design principles 🚫 Inconsistent UI components 🚫 Lack of visual hierarchy and branding 🚫 Edge cases and states not handled Why? Because the initial product team was mostly: 💪 A brilliant Founder (mostly a developer) 💪 Frontend & Backend Devs 💪 A PM 💪 QA (occasionally) 🤔 UX Designer? Rare, if at all. Sound familiar? What the client expected from us: They wanted: ✨ A fresh, modern UI ✨ Better product experience ✨ Consistency across user roles ✨ A stronger visual identity ✨ To stay ahead of the competition But here's what we didn't do... - We did not jump into redesigning right away. - Instead, we spent 2 full weeks doing something crucial. We asked questions. 62 to be exact. (There were more) Why? Because design is not just about UI. It's about understanding the business, its vision, and how its processes work. We worked in a completely different domain from the client. Sure, we could have redesigned everything quickly. But without understanding the why, what, and how, whatever we designed would’ve missed the mark. So here's what we did: 👉 Performed a comprehensive design audit 👉 Mapped the Information Architecture for every user type 👉 Grouped the 6–7 user roles into 3 primary personas 👉 Curated a deep question set to extract product logic, goals, and pain points 👉 Did a heuristic evaluation (Want to see how? Let me know 👇) And yes, we even added a question just to clarify a small confusion. Lessons We Learned: ✅ Ask as many questions as needed ✅ No question is a “stupid” question ✅ Collaboration is everything (Their team nailed this 👏) ✅ Always audit before redesign ✅ Include the development team early on ✅ A good audit = deeper product understanding ✅ Take your time (if allowed), it’s worth it ✅ Talk to your user My Final Thought A product might function perfectly, but it still might feel broken to the user. A successful redesign doesn’t start with visuals; it starts with empathy, curiosity, and clarity. How would you approach a product revamp? Drop your thoughts or questions in the comments 💬👇 #UXDesign #ProductDesign #DesignAudit #Fintech

 Your competitors are already studying your UX Are you studying theirs? Outstanding UX is the outcome of thoughtful design decisions It happens when you understand what competitors do well   and where they fail That’s where a UX Competitive Audit comes in  Step 1: Define the Objective Before analyzing competitors, define your goal. Ask: • What are we trying to learn? • Where do competitors outperform us? • What UX gaps exist in the market? Clear objectives = focused insights Step 2: Create an Evaluation Matrix Build a structured framework to compare products. Evaluate areas like: • Usability • Features & functionality • Performance • Customer journey • Engagement Consistency makes the comparison meaningful Step 3: Identify Competitors Select 5–10 relevant competitors Sources to find them: • Google industry searches • Platforms like Clutch or G2 • LinkedIn company research • Market reports and customer reviews Mix direct and indirect competitors Step 4: Analyze the Experience Study how competitors actually perform. Methods include: • Usability testing • Heatmaps & click tracking • User surveys and feedback • Feature walkthroughs Focus on real user behavior, not assumptions Step 5: Turn Insights Into Action Your audit should produce clear decisions. Document: • Key insights • UX strengths vs weaknesses • Opportunities for differentiation • Priority improvements Insights without action are useless. A UX Competitive Audit isn’t about copying competitors. It’s about understanding the landscape so you can design a better experience. The best products don’t just compete on features. They win on experience. If you're designing a product today, a UX audit should be part of your strategy Follow Subash Chandra for more UI/UX insights

PIVOT Principle - Strategic Communication Change creates uncertainty, and uncertainty fills the silence when leaders do not #communicate. That is why a clear, timely, intentional strategic communication plan is essential whenever an organization is moving through change. Everyone wants to know what is happening—employees, customers, vendors, suppliers, and partners. If they do not hear directly from you, they will create their own narrative, and that narrative is rarely accurate or helpful. An effective strategic communication plan defines what needs to be shared, when it should be shared, how the message will be delivered, and who is handling the communication. Communication methods should be varied and intentional: in-person conversations, team meetings, printed materials, email, social media, and short videos all play a role in reaching different audiences. Keep in mind, who the message receiver is. Equally important is planning for two-way communication. How will questions be answered? Who will respond to concerns? What is the escalation path? During times of change, communication is not a “nice to have.” It is a #leadership responsibility and a critical driver of trust, alignment, and results. Failure to communicate can lead to poor results. Please reach out if you need any assistance developing a strategic communication plan. #PIVOT #leadingchange