Write it down before you draw it

Most projects reach me as a feeling. Someone knows the sign-up is slow, or the brand looks tired, but nobody has said what should change. So before I open a design tool, I write.

It’s rarely long. A page, sometimes less, in plain sentences that anyone on the team could read without a glossary. Who is this for? What are they trying to do? What gets in their way today?

Sentences catch what sketches hide

A sketch can look finished long before the thinking is. Boxes and arrows fill a page quickly, and they feel like progress. Sentences are harder to fake. If I can’t write the problem in two lines, I don’t understand it yet, and no amount of drawing will fix that.

Writing also exposes the words we use without agreeing on them. On one team, “account” meant three different things depending on who was speaking. We only noticed because I tried to write a single sentence about it and couldn’t.

When the writing disagrees

Sometimes the page argues back. I start writing about a slow sign-up and end up describing a pricing page that nobody understands. That used to feel like a detour. Now I treat it as the most useful thing the page can do.

When it happens, I don’t force the sentences back onto the original brief. I write down both versions, the problem we were asked to fix and the one the writing found, and take them to the team side by side. Two short paragraphs make an easier conversation than a finished design that quietly solves something else.

Most of the time we keep the original scope and note the other problem for later. Occasionally the brief changes. Either way, we’ve made the choice on purpose, before anyone has spent a week on screens.

What goes on the page

I keep the same short list each time. The person and the moment they arrive. The job they came to do. What they see now, and why it fails them. What a good outcome looks like, described as something they could do rather than something they’d feel.

Then I share it before anything else. People correct a paragraph more freely than a mock-up, because a paragraph doesn’t look like anyone worked hard on it. That’s exactly why it’s useful.

The page doesn’t survive the project. Once the work has a shape, it moves into the brief or disappears. But the decisions it forced early on stay in the work, and they save a lot of time spent polishing the wrong thing.