As User Experience Designers we pride ourselves on creating great looking, easy to use web sites and interfaces. But do our proposals follow what we preach? We took a look at our proposals to make sure. And the results were really interesting…

The Look

We used to create our proposals in Microsoft Word. But as a Mac shop it was cumbersome to open up Parallels and deal with all the wonderful layout functionality Word does NOT provide. So we moved over to Pages and weren’t terribly happy with its limitations. Next we decided to step up to Adobe InDesign. It provided us with maximum layout control and overall a more polished presentation. After several iterations the results were:

• Clearly demonstrated visual hierarchy
• Liberal use of whitespace to assist scanning
• Strong typography
• Brand reaffirming

The Content

Next we took a look at how we explain ourselves and what the potential client is getting from us. And we noticed that we use a lot of industry-speak. You know- mental modeling, design compositions, PSDs, and “think aloud” protocols aren’t the easiest deliverables to grasp if you haven’t experienced these things in practice. So we described each deliverable. Not by what it is but by its value to the project.

Next we paid homage to Mr. Tufte by creating an easy to read project activity view. It made it really easy for a client to understand activities, pricing, and timeline all in one view.

So what was the outcome? An easy to read, easy to understand, simple document that made it really easy to understand us, how we work, what we deliver, and how we plan on delivering it. It took us several weeks to do this but it was worth it as it minimized the questions from the client and demonstrated our User Experience Design capabilities outside of our portfolio. In essence, the proposal IS part of the portfolio.

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