The best prompt I use in creative meetings

I didn’t come from a design background, although I do regret that sometimes. If you’re like me, the good news is you can learn the language of design to contribute impactful, meaningful work to creative meetings.

One of my favorite prompts I’ve picked up over the years is a simple way to explain a creative decision. The best thing about it is that it applies to a variety of roles—content design, content strategy, UX writing/experience, marketing, copywriting, creative direction, etc.

The magical prompt

“We want it to feel/do/achieve/____, so we’ll ____.”

What it does:

• Highlights the user need, product/marketing/creative goal

• Sets the tone and the reason for WHY the creative/UX choice was made to complete the experience

It’s worth sharing that in order to get to this place of beautiful simplicity, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done on before this, ranging from research to mapping back to strategy across brand, marketing, and business. So this workflow assumes that has already been done.

Next steps

I always aim to provide 2-10 different options/creative directions. 3 is often the magic number for final reviews, but earlier iterations might require a lot of ideas for direction.

When you do get to the final review, a good rule of thumb is to provide a simple version (not far off from whatever has already been done), a totally new direction, and a hybrid version that’s sort of in the middle.

I hope this helps someone else!