Scott Thomas, Design Director for New Media and overseer of the ‘Obama for America’ election campaign web site, took time out to go over what made the campaign a success from his perspective.  What techniques, means, methods and more they used to achieve their ultimate goals.  The video available over at The 99 Percent is worth every minute of watch time.

For those less interested in watching and more interested in a summary of the 14 minute talk, Scott Thomas highlights some interesting core notions, ideas and areas, but to preface what he says and to quote the 99% website:

Scott Thomas is constantly seeking the simplest answer to complex problems.

With that said, here are the salient points of note from the lecture given by Scott Thomas:

Design Consistency

From the outset the team realised that they would need consistency of design throughout, from the digital, right through to the traditional.  Consistency was essential not just for brand awareness, but also in terms of being ‘on message’ and in providing strength to the campaign.

He doesn’t say as much but there is clear value in consistency, on many different levels, and to this end they derived processes that would help drive this need forward, defining consistency of output in terms of colour, elements, message using:

• Mission statements … helped define everything that was being done.  They focused on an ethos of making sure every aspect of design was “clear” and “concise” and that all design should engender “hope” and “experience”.  Slogans that encapsulated these ideas were created and posted everywhere, forcing the team to think about them at all times.
• Brand Groups .. were used to help define exactly how these mission statements were to be executed.  Consider them as mini corporate design guides, that make it easy to consistently deliver output int he same clear and structured fashion sot hat it hits the target.

Effective Triage

The reality is that when you are in a fast moving environment, and you need everything done “now” the design process will reach a bottleneck at some point.  It is therefore important to have effective triage; to be able to sort tasks on a basis of need and to be able to defer responsibility or things more readily.  Not necessarily by giving up your core design values, but but opening up access to assets for others, providing transparency and for the ability of other stakeholders to feel like they are more involved in the process.

Effective apportioning of tasks and responsibilities, as well as letting go with clearly defined rules and guides, as outlined in point one, makes it a lot easier to accomplish much higher level and more important tasks.  If you focus on the minutae, it is super simple to lose control of the bigger picture and of the more important things.

Use IT to Better Ideas

Simplicity is key to success, and information technology should be used to improve upon ideas for the sake of that simplicity.  Lots of processes are over-complicated and can be reduced down, thus enhancing their efficacy and conversation rates.  When you want to involve people, you need to lower the barriers to entry.  Open you door, let people in easily, and ask pertinent questions later by deferring the need for them.  This is a definite key to their grassroots success, with individuals being able to start cold calling fellow politicos in no less than 3-4 clicks.

During the course of the campaign they used analytics and process flows to monitor what was happening, and constantly aimed to improve the situation by reducing roadblocks.  This was an on-going process and proves that there is little point in rolling out designs and code without observing and enhancing it as you go in order to avoid diminishing returns of scale.

Bring Output In-House

Back on the old cherry of ‘consistency’, the team weren’t afraid to bring any task in-house.  Ensuring quality of output wasn’t ever up for discussion and where they had to do things internally, from design digital content or even physical objects and signs for TV appearances, they would just do so.  When much larger things are at stake than merely budget, you need to keep your eye on the ball and make what would not necessarily be business-friendly decisions.  Ultimately you need to resource your teams and processes properly to maintain the aims of your campaign.  False economies only spiral out into bigger costs later, and that is not just in terms of monetary costs.

Collaborate Successfully

Success is about collaboration.  Knowing what you can and can’t achieve and working with people that inspire and motivate you.  When working closely with a set of people you need to have confidence and a desire to drive things forward.  As soon a this is lost you loose a necessary cohesion in the high-pressure environment.  Belief and passion are real drivers and tapping into those goes a long way.  It pays to draw this ideal through every strain of what you do and maintain it from the beginning to the end of any project.  It’s easy to let it wane, but with consideration can be avoided.  Who doesn’t love to work with empowered and passionate individuals, right?

Evolve Your Ideas

Evolution of ideas is important.  If you look at the ’2 year lifecycle’ of the new media campaign there is a clear evolution of the designs and implementation.  Evolution isn’t a dirty word – even if creationists thinks so – and when the pressure is on to get work done, it allows you to design and implement, and then enhance, not just the once but again and again and again.

The evolutionary process breaks down barriers to getting work signed off and implemented, and allows you to work more readily on the fly, to hit the ground running and to keep your momentum.  It’s super easy to let road blocks of design and function get in the way of rolling out product, losing sight of the most important thing, which is to have something out there, working for you which provide implicit usage feedback and which can be worked on and improved over time.

It’s A Wrap!

So there you have it.  Some golden words, thoughts, and ideas from Scott Thomas.  All things that make so much sense, but which get lost in the maelstrom of any big project.  Oh … And a last little bit of advice? Write things down.