Before the redesign, decide what customers should understand

01Start with a customer situation

Describe the moment in which someone would look for help. What are they trying to accomplish? What has changed? What would make the decision consequential? “Mid-sized businesses” describes a group; it does not explain why a person in that group would care today.

Use evidence you can inspect: enquiry notes, customer interviews, win and loss conversations or the questions people ask before committing. Distinguish direct customer language from the team’s interpretation. A phrase repeated inside the company may never have been used by a buyer.

You do not need perfect research before any design work starts. You do need to distinguish settled choices from hypotheses. That helps a designer decide what to communicate clearly and what the team still needs to test.

02Identify the alternatives customers actually consider

The alternative may be another supplier, an internal team, a spreadsheet, a temporary workaround or leaving the problem alone. Ask about the most recent real decision, rather than asking customers to imagine an ideal purchase. What did they consider, and what made an option acceptable or unacceptable?

Positioning specialist April Dunford connects alternatives, differentiated capabilities, customer value, target customers and market category. She treats messaging and branding as work that uses positioning as an input.¹ We adapt that specialist method here to a service-business brief; this is not a validated prediction of buyer behavior.

Choosing alternatives carefully matters because a capability is only different relative to something. “We offer reporting” may be distinctive against a manual workaround and commonplace against a specialist provider. Write the comparison you can support, without disparaging a competitor or guessing what they cannot do.

The brief below combines these components into a few working prompts. Include a familiar category or description that helps the customer understand what kind of service you provide. Check the expectations that description creates: a category that sounds attractive but implies services you do not deliver will confuse the choice.

03Connect a supported difference to a useful outcome

List a capability you can demonstrate today. Then ask what it helps the customer do, avoid or understand. Keep moving until the result is meaningful in the customer’s situation. “An integrated dashboard” names a feature. “The service manager can see which jobs need intervention before the morning meeting” describes a possible use that can be examined.

Now identify the proof available: a working demonstration, a documented delivery process, an appropriately permitted example or a clear account of how the work will be done. If proof is missing, label the statement as a hypothesis or remove it from the public promise until support exists.

Premium presentation should help a reader understand this substance. It cannot establish expertise, results, exclusivity or demand that the business has not demonstrated. Avoid urgency or scarcity language unless the constraint is real and accurately described.

04An illustrative brief: a maintenance provider

Imagine a maintenance business planning a new website. Its current headline says it delivers excellent service. Interviews suggest that a particular customer group is struggling to coordinate visits around operating hours. The company can document how it agrees access windows and communicates changes.

The resulting positioning hypothesis might focus on predictable coordination for that customer situation. The design brief would ask the website to explain the scheduling process, show what customers need to provide and make the limits clear. It would not claim uninterrupted operations or guaranteed response times without evidence and an actual commitment.

The example is invented. The lesson is the connection between a customer’s decision, an evidenced capability and the information the design must convey, not the particular claim this hypothetical business might use.

05Turn the positioning brief into page decisions

For each proposed page or visual, name the customer question it answers. A diagram might explain the delivery sequence. A comparison may clarify when an offer fits. Photography may show the real team or work, provided the rights and context are appropriate. A decorative image has a different job; do not present it as proof.

Write an initial headline and supporting explanation using the brief. Show them to people who resemble the intended customers, without first explaining your intended meaning. Ask what they think the business helps with, who it appears to be for and what they would need to know next.

Record their words and uncertainties. This is a comprehension check, not a popularity vote. A striking design that consistently produces the wrong understanding needs revision; a clear statement still needs credible delivery behind it.

06When the website really is the immediate problem

A broken enquiry path, unreadable mobile layout or inaccessible content may need fixing before positioning is fully resolved. Do that useful work. The brief is not a reason to leave a known usability failure in place.

Nor should one positioning exercise become permanent doctrine. Customer needs, alternatives and capabilities change. Save the evidence date and the assumptions so the team can revisit them.

Use the worksheet to prepare a designer’s working brief: the situation, alternatives, difference, outcome, proof and language to test. If a field remains uncertain, name the evidence needed. That is a more useful instruction than asking the design to make an unresolved offer feel premium.