How can you craft a professional UX UI Design Brief? A Detailed Guide

Design brief is a short document presenting a concise overview of the project. It is also known as a project brief. All the essential information related to a project is included in a design brief. Hence, it is an essential component of the UX UI design strategy.

It summarizes the business goals, initial data, facts, product benefits, and user expectations. Therefore, it is important to pay due importance to its crafting. A UX design brief results in a detailed conversation among business owners, designers, and product managers. Thus, they settle the process of the actual UX UI design.

An effective and conducive project brief includes:

Business expectations
Mechanism
Target audience
Management tools
Expected deliverables
Deadlines and budget

Usually, designers or design agencies ask clients to write the project requirements, which works as a project brief. However, you can also have your own design team for this purpose. A productive design project brief results from the mutual discussion between you and the designers.

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Importance of writing a design brief:

An unclear design project brief is the worst enemy for a design strategy. It creates disturbance between you and the designers. Therefore, unclear objectives and requirements may create ambiguity. Hence, designers can not assess the priorities. As a result, you may face delays in deadlines and the expenditure of a heavy budget. Ultimately, you will not get the desired results.

A design brief serves as the base for a design strategy. It must include vital information with brevity. Therefore, a clear and tangible project brief is significant.

Here is a draft of a design brief. It includes all the vital information concisely.

Image Source: Draft of a Project brief

You can also check this simple project brief example.

Image Source: Eleken

Why do you need a design brief for your project?

It is an important question to ask yourself. Here are similar questions to ask yourself.

What’s the main advantage of writing a design brief?
How can you get benefit from it?
What are its major impacts?

A design brief benefits you in the following manners.

It clears confusion regarding the project requirements and outputs.
Helps in a deep analysis of the project inputs and output.
A fully compiled design brief identifies the missing links in the project strategy.
It results in mutual discussion among the team members regarding the specific and targeted product design.
Eases the task of specifying the roles and tasks within a team.
You can quickly deal with new entries and project requirements.
It smoothens the overall design planning.
It is the basis of collaboration between you and designers.

Essential elements of a design brief:

Every design project brief is unique. It has its own requirements. However, there are some common elements among all the design project briefs. These elements determine the success of a project brief. Because they provide a clear understanding of the desired project. However, it should be brief. These common elements are:

- Information about the client
- Main objectives and goals of the project
- Budget and expectations
- Milestones and deadlines
- Technical aspects of the design brief
- Communication channels
- Final remarks

Who will write the project brief?

Generally, clients or business owners write the project brief. Because they have a better understanding of the project expectations. However, it is crucial to collaborate with the designers and product managers for a comprehensive design brief.

Main stakeholders of project brief:

The main stakeholders of the project brief are:

Client:

A client or business owner has the most critical role in the design brief. He knows the specifications and goals better. In the design brief, you should specify your position and role in the company.

Designer:

A designer writes a project brief if you are not aware of the technical aspects of the design. Designers ask for the required information from you regarding the product brief and formulate the design brief. Ensure to analyze the design brief draft for satisfaction.

Collaboration team:

The third significant role in the UX UI design brief is of the collaboration team. All team members can provide a better approach and a standard template for the design brief. Hence, a perfect project brief will be the final result after mutual discussion among team members. In this way, you can get a customer-oriented project brief.

How to write a UX UI design brief?

There is no one-size-fits-all formula for writing a UX design brief. Design briefs vary from business to business. Additionally, several requirements and complexities require different approaches. Therefore, you need to create customized project briefs. However, here is the list of the 11 most common components essential for writing a design brief.

A brief introduction to your business:

The foremost part of a UX design brief is the introduction to your business. Mention the following essential elements of your business.

Core values
Objectives and goals
Tone and voice
Firm size

If you have a brand identity, elaborate it to your designers for a personalized project brief. However, keep your design brief concise yet informative.

For a start-up, a generalized formula of business ambition will work. In addition, add links to the different sections of your business for a detailed analysis.

Identify project scope:

Project scope plays a vital role in defining the limits of a design project. It covers an overview of the tasks from the beginning to the end of the project. Hence, you will get an estimate of the complexity and length of the project.

It should include:

the number of tasks to complete
responsibilities
total number of individuals
expectations from the designers.

Project scope is different for different types of design projects. Therefore, an app design brief will differ from a website design brief. This uniqueness leads to a creative project brief for every single project.

It is worth mentioning that you can not achieve the desired outputs without the project scope. Your team may add unnecessary features to your design project, resulting in a heavy budget and loss of time. Therefore, always include the project scope in your design brief draft.

Elaborate design goals:

Design goals have a central focus in a project brief. These goals define the expectations you want from your product or service. The goals may be:

better user experience
mobile-friendly app or product,
improved performance of an existing product, etc.

You need to tell designers about the target goals. All the information needs to be specific. In this way, they may act accordingly to achieve the expected aims.

Difference between project goals and objectives:

However, it is important to know that goals differ from objectives. Goals define the overall expectation from a product. However, an objective is to achieve a specific desirable task.

For example:

Creating a product’s UI design is a goal, but increasing conversions of a landing page by 10% is an objective.

Focus on the target audience:

A product or service won’t bring desired results if you don’t know your target audience. Therefore, make a general concept of your target audience in the project brief. You can take help from the existing user research or business goals to identify potential customers. Then, include your primary target audience in your UI UX design brief to attain the best results.

Project deliverables:

Also, mention the expected project deliverables in your project brief you want to attain. The major project deliverables are:

User research
User personas
User flows
Customer journey maps
Moodboards
Wireframes and
Prototypes

Make sure you have selected all the deliverables according to the user research and business goals.

Know the competition:

Competition has an integral part in deciding the final project design. It helps to create a better design strategy to excel in the market. Therefore, a deep analysis of the market competitors is required.

In this regard, analyze your direct and indirect competitors. Make a list of those competitors and include it in the design brief. Designers will get a better understanding of the competition. Thus, they will try to outperform your business in design success.

Suggest technical specifications:

Technical inspection is an integral UX strategy. It is mainly connected to later UX UI deliverables. However, you can mention it in the design brief to improve the existing design.

Different technical requirements for a design brief are:

Backend technical development:

Designers may benefit from the technical documentation about the product background. Identifying a design’s technical requirements helps create a responsive front design. In addition, it identifies the accessibility and user experience issues. Therefore, it should be included in the design brief. However, it is not necessarily required in the initial stages. You can include it for better results.

Business analytics:

Provide business analytics in the form of customer journey maps, buyer personas, user flow, etc. These will help to create a targeted design brief.

Design and technical tools:

Color, font, format, design templates, management tools, and frontend libraries and folders provide an extra edge if provided in the initial stage.

Provide existing components and references:

References help to have a general idea of the actual design. Therefore, if you have any references to different apps, design strategies, or websites, provide them to the designers. In this way, they can better understand the final output.

Apart from it, provide designers and product managers with the existing design elements. These include brand logo, color, design strategy, mood boards, UI UX tools, design kits, etc. Also, mention the improvements if you want to update an existing product or service design. These will help you acquire a clear design brief and mechanism.

Deadlines:

Deadlines and milestones tell you the exact boundaries of a design project. They play a central role in the success of a design project. Therefore, they should be included in the project brief. they

From the user research to final corrections, all the tasks must accompany their due time schedule. In this way, you can assess the speed and quality of the project. Furthermore, they will help create a smooth flow to accomplish the UI UX deliverables.

Expected budget:

Clear all the deals if you are hiring an outside design team. It will help you run the project process smoothly. Ensure you fix a definite budget with the designers, i.e., $500 for the overall design project. In this way, you can relieve yourself of the recurring budget schedules.

The overall budget for a project depends upon several things. These are:

project requirements
complexity and
the proposal from the designers or design company (in case of hiring a remote or off-site company)

Effective communication:

Constant communication is the key to building trust with the designers. Build a strong network with the designers via suitable communication channels.

These may include:

Calls
Online Zoom meetings
Video conferences
On-site meetings

Ask questions related to the design brief and project. Clear any ambiguity and confusion. In this way, you can have a solid network to solve any difficulties during the project strategy. Choose a suitable time for online meetings in case of different time zones.

UX project brief template:

You have better understood how to write a perfect project brief. Here is a UX UI design brief template. You can get a vivid idea of crafting a professional design brief with the help of this project brief template.

Commencement: Mention date	UX UI Design Brief Template	Updated: Mention date (if the brief is updated)
Background	What’s the product about? Describe the context and background of the product or service. Why is the design brief processed?
Objectives	What are the expected outputs? Mention business and user goals
Standard scoring points	Key Performance Indicators, company targets, benchmarks, UX metrics, objectives, and key results (OKRs) are standards for measuring success. Mention them in the project brief as your targets.
Target audience	Who are your end users? How can you address them?
Competitors	Include links to your direct and indirect competitors. Make a list of them for the designers to analyze.
Technical requirements	What are the technical aspects of the project? Background of the design display
References and style guides	Include references to admiring design projects, existing guides, and UI UX designs.
Stakeholders	Who are the stakeholders in the project brief? What are their responsibilities and roles?
Project Scope	What’s the scope of the project? What may be included in the scope based on time and budget availability? What are not the core objectives of the design project?
Dependencies and Risks	Include essential requirements for the project They may be some tools or individuals.
Timing	Mention the date and time of the project commencement, milestones, and delivery time.
Communication	Discuss the tools that will be used for communication. They may be Zoom, Skype, WhatsApp, Slack, Email, and Calls. What kind of organizational work will be conducted? Include the process of reports, daily or weekly analysis, and meetings for the project’s success.
Deliverables	What will be the end results?
Design and documentation tools	Mention details of the tools and documents for the project deliverables.
Available data	What type of existing data is available for the project brief? Write a concise design brief with the help of it.