No More Design Deliverables, Only Tools

Client collaboration has always been a complicated process in the consultancy world. There are so many complexities to navigate: who needs to be involved at what stage, what systems are we going to use, how will we get materials back and forth in a safe and secure and private manner? Software was always supposed to make this process easier, but from my earliest days in a digital consultancy (25 years ago!) we had a running joke: “That’ll be in the next version of SharePoint.”

There’s also a tension between whether “collaboration” means “exchanging ideas and collectively determining a best path forward,” or “securing approval on a milestone so we can mark that part of the project complete and move on.” Collaboration is as much about relationships and managing disparate processes between teams (within the same organization, or across multiple organizations), as it is about the mechanics of how information moves back and forth.

Our Experience Design practice has begun in the last year to move away from static deliverables that we hand off to clients, in favor of collaborative tools that provide a framework for ongoing refinement. This has meant fewer wireframes, static design files, and Figma designs, and more interactive analytical tools, design frameworks, and prototypes.

None of this would be possible without AI.

Inspired by Luke Wrobleski’s Character Maker and Design Tools are the New Deliverables we began to think more critically about what the hand-off process would look like between our Experience Design team and our clients. In doing so, we had in mind three foundational questions:

• As Designers working with multidisciplinary teams, what parts of the product development process are we most interested in influencing?
• In a Consultancy context – where budgets, timelines, scope and project outputs are defined (and priced) long before a project begins, how do we make the best use of the limited time we have to scale that influence in positive ways?
• New Design tools are always coming along– from Visio and Photoshop to Miro and Figma – but AI tooling has shifted the ground more in the past 6 months than all of the SaaS-based design tools have done in the past 10 years. How can we use that to our, and our clients’, advantage?

As one example, a recent client asked us to help them interpret how their Design System could influence their thinking around Motion Design. The challenge lay in finding a way to interpret the company’s brand personality into a set of motion mechanics that could be applied to their digital presence, including the movement of objects around a webpage, and the micro-animations applied to interactive elements when you interact with them.

To be sure, there are default motion models available in most digital design tools, like Figma, which we could have used. But our client’s high-profile digital brand felt deserving of unique, if subtle, interactions to help cement their overall digital personality.

In addition to providing a UI where we can directly experiment with motion models in-situ, MotionLab operates as a stand-alone application we can share with clients, who can review the models we’ve created, tweak them, and create new models of their own.

Once the team is collectively satisfied with the model and how its application to different collections of elements looks and feels, the entire system is exportable as CSS variables, JSON tokens, and a full Implementation Guide for handoff to developers. We can also export a standalone demo of the full motion design system as applied to a given set of canvases, so that client and development teams can see the full design intent in living color and motion.

This is a step-change in Experience Design, the ability to not only demonstrate working prototypes that communicate design intent, but to deliver working applications which produce those prototypes, and let clients experiment with them.

Building stand-alone software – possibly for use in just a single client project – would previously have been unthinkable for a consultancy of our size. Nor would a consultancy of any size have seriously considered such a development task without carefully weighing the balance of costs between building a tool like this, and leaning on something (Like Figma Motion, recently released but comparatively under-powered) that could be licensed.

Today, however, one-shot applications that enable clients to take part in fine-tuning a deliverable, and which output development-ready assets, are easily within reach.