What is Great Design?

I like to fill the walls with printouts of designs. Webpages, emails, ads - both internal and our competition. They’re a good way to make comparisons, stimulate ideas and review work that has been accomplished.

When doing reviews with designers, I get them to point at the wall and tell me which one they feel was a great design. Often the elaborate creations with bright colours get chosen, and yes they are beautiful, but are they great?

• Did it get more views?

• Were there more clicks?

• Was the content engaged with?

• Did more people make a purchase?

Essentially, did it do its job or did it just look great? There has to be an objective way to evaluate design, otherwise we will always be chasing the next pretty graphic. It often surprises people that the simple designs often outperformed the complex ones.

To help designers frame success, I get them to keep fundamentals in mind:

• What is the project goal?

• Who are we talking to?

• Is the creative clear and relevant?

• Do elements add value or distract?

• Does the design drive action?

• How will we measure success?

These fundamentals become the foundation of design best practices.

By challenging creative routinely, we set baselines for performance and best practices for design that we can objectively evaluate and improve on. Without that, it’s easy to get into debates about how we feel about something. What makes one person’s opinion better than another? Particularly for managers like myself that may not be trained designers, it can be difficult to provide criticism without objective grounds.

That doesn’t stop us from testing crazy things once in a while, but something isn’t great just because it's novel, or bright. Create standards for design and define what is great, and everyone will get on the same page.