To say that design is at the heart of every communication would be an understatement. Modes of communication may have changed across the centuries, but one thing that has always been an integral part of it is the concept of design. Design impact can be seen and experienced everywhere, whether it is an ornate Italian hand-lettered Bible with beautiful illustrations from the 13th century or the brochure for your latest Smartphone. Design influence can be as subtle as just a logo placed strategically in the corner or as bold as a fine art painting with a paragraph imprinted on it. Here are 10 effective hacks to design influence your audience and get the results you want:
1] START BY IDENTIFYING THE NEEDS
While creating any communication to effectively engage the audience, identifying needs is the most critical part. This constitutes the research that is conducted regarding the market and consumers. For example, while marketing a certain product, how the product will benefit the consumer and how it will fulfil a need is the aspect that is required to be identified while designing the communication.
2] KEEP IT ACTION-ORIENTED
Creating a powerful brand recall involves getting the target audience to ‘act upon’ something through striking design. That’s why so many apparels and sports brands talk about taking action, even going so far as to tell you to ‘just do it!’
3] MAKE YOUR DESIGN HUMAN-CENTRIC
Empathy is one of the most vital things in the design thinking process. To focus on both, the customer’s (or end user’s) physical and emotional needs, and understand the way they do things and why various observational and listening-based research techniques are required. This research has to be incorporated into your design.
4] CREATE MEANING THROUGH DESIGN
Creating meaning is the hardest part of the design process as it takes time and emerges through multiple iterations and conversations. This phase is your time to define the consumers’ problems based on the context and what you have learned about your users or team.
5] MAKE A PROTOTYPE
While this may seem more relevant in the case of product design, it is also an important tactic that can be used while designing communication to engage the audience. Create a ‘mood board’ of the ideas and images that you are going to use and test them out with potential consumers to see its effectiveness.
6] IDEATE TOWARDS REDUCING RISKS
Although you should not be afraid of risks, design thinking still helps you find a way to minimize potential failures. There will always be roadblocks when developing a new design. Identify the elements that may not suit the market, customers etc. and avoid them while creating communication.
7] ADOPTING AN AGILE MINDSET
The most important aspect of design thinking is adopting an agile mindset for the process of problem-solving while creating communication to engage the audience. The whole idea is to get actionable as soon as possible and to involve individual people throughout.
8] INDULGE IN EXPERIMENTATION
One of the biggest barriers to change in many creative organizations is the perceived need to perfect something before it gets released into the world. Do not be shy to indulge in a little experimentation and like we have mentioned before, take the time out for prototyping.
9] BE COMFORTABLE WITH CHANGE
Many of us are scared to take the initial leap, feeling comfortable with the status quo. But the complex and vague problems nowadays require a new way of thinking, free from old traditional methods or conservative slow decision-making processes, which just make things worse.
10] BE CREATIVE
This may sound redundant, but when we say ‘be creative’ we are talking about incorporating different perspectives in your design so that it appeals to a wide range of consumers and helps engage the audience.
3 Dots Design is a creative mainline and digital advertising agency that specializes in ways to ‘design influence’ your audience. Contact 3 Dots Design to fulfil your communication needs with our design thinking expertise!