Today I worked on a creative brief for an imaginary company called ClearWeek.
The slogan is simple:
Know what to do next.
The idea came from something that has been very real during this course.
Some weeks I do not have only one assignment to complete. I have a discussion, a quiz, an interview, an article, a blog and something else sitting behind all of them.
Week 6 felt like that.
At one point, I was moving between the AP Style test, my interview notes, the feature article, Media Ethics and newsletter work. None of the assignments was impossible by itself.
The problem was deciding what needed my attention first.
That is where the ClearWeek idea came from.
The imaginary product is a student dashboard that takes deadlines and turns them into a simple weekly view. The point is not to create another giant productivity system. There are already many of those.
I imagined something that answers three questions:
What is due?
What matters today?
What can wait?
That sounds almost too simple.
Maybe that is why I like it.
As a designer, I sometimes have the instinct to add features because features make a project look complete. Another button. Another section. Another option.
But I have also seen what happens when a screen has too much information. Nielsen’s usability heuristics put a name to this: removing irrelevant or rarely needed information is one of the ten.
The user stops seeing hierarchy.
Writing the creative brief made me think about the same thing in communication. It is the same problem I ran into when I wrote about design not being able to rescue an unclear message: clutter hides the point, whether the clutter is visual or verbal.
A clear message is also a kind of interface.
The reader should know where to look first.
I am not actually launching ClearWeek after this assignment. It is imaginary.
Still, the problem behind it is real.
And I may keep the slogan for myself this week.
Know what to do next.
That is enough sometimes.
