Chicago, IL
8:14 PM
I have worked on projects that started with a 40-page brand document, three stakeholder interviews, and a discovery sprint that lasted two weeks. I have also worked on projects that started with a voice note and a Pinterest board.
The outcome was not correlated with the length of the brief.
What correlated with the outcome was whether everyone involved agreed on three things before a single frame was designed: what the site needs to do, who it is for, and what success looks like. Everything else is detail that can be figured out along the way.
Three years ago I built a one-page document that forces those three answers before any project starts. I have used it on every engagement since. Here is what is in it and why each section exists.
Section 1: The single sentence
At the top of the document, one sentence. Not a paragraph. One sentence that completes this prompt: "This website exists to..."
Examples of bad answers: "showcase our brand and connect with customers and drive awareness." That is three things, which means it is no things. A site that tries to do everything optimizes for nothing.
Examples of good answers: "get qualified leads to book a discovery call." "Sell the $97 course to people who already follow me on Instagram." "Convince investors this team can execute."
One sentence. One job. If the client cannot write it, that is important information and we work on it together before anything else moves forward.
Section 2: The one person
Who is this site actually for? Not "our customers" or "anyone interested in design." One specific person. Give them a name if it helps.
I ask clients to describe the person who, if they landed on the site and immediately booked or bought, would make the project feel like a complete success. Age, job, what they are worried about, what they are hoping for, why they are on this site and not a competitor's.
This section exists because design decisions are easier when you have a person to design for. Font size, reading level of the copy, which features to surface first, how much to explain versus assume, all of it gets clearer when you can ask "would Maya understand this in three seconds."
Section 3: The three must-haves
Not ten. Not a wishlist. Three things that the site absolutely must do or include for the project to be considered successful.
I ask clients to rank them. The ranking matters because when a design decision forces a tradeoff, which it always does eventually, we already know which of the three wins.
I also ask clients to list three things the site must not do. This is often more useful than the must-haves. "Must not feel corporate" tells me more about the aesthetic direction than almost any mood board. "Must not require a lot of ongoing maintenance" tells me immediately that we are building with CMS fields for everything the client will want to update.
Section 4: The reference point
One site, not five, that the client thinks is doing something right. Not necessarily in their industry. Just a site they respond to, that makes them feel something they want their own visitors to feel.
Then I ask: what specifically about it. Not "I like the vibe." What specifically. The font? The way it loads? The photography? The amount of white space?
That specificity is the brief. "I like how the Stripe site explains complex things simply without making you feel dumb" is a design direction. "I like the Apple website" is not.
Section 5: The number
One metric. The number that will tell us, three months after launch, whether the site worked.
Not three metrics. One. The most important one.
This is the section clients push back on the most. They want to track everything. I explain that tracking everything means optimizing for nothing, and that choosing one number forces the kind of clarity that makes the design decisions easier, not harder.
Common answers: conversion rate on the main CTA, number of qualified leads per month, email signups per week, revenue from a specific product page. Whatever it is, we write it down and we agree that this is what we are building toward.
How I use it
I send the document to the client before our first call and ask them to fill it in. The quality of their answers tells me almost everything I need to know about how the project will go.
Clients who fill it in quickly and specifically are usually a pleasure to work with. They know what they want, they can articulate it, and they trust the process enough to commit to answers.
Clients who send back vague answers or ask if they can add more sections usually need more time in discovery. That is not a problem. It is information. Better to find out before the first design review than after the third revision.
What it is not
It is not a replacement for conversation. The document is a starting point, not a contract. Sometimes the single sentence changes halfway through. Sometimes the one person turns out to be two different people with different needs and we have to make a decision about which one to prioritize.
What the document does is make those conversations happen early, when they are cheap, rather than late, when they are expensive.
A revision on a one-page brief costs twenty minutes. A revision after a full site build costs days.
Getting it
If you want the actual template, it is linked in the newsletter. One page, five sections, takes about thirty minutes to fill in properly.
I have used it on projects ranging from $1,500 landing pages to $20,000 full brand builds. The format scales. The principle does not change.
Know what you are building, who you are building it for, and what success looks like. Write it down. Agree on it before you start.
Everything after that is execution.