How to Write a UX-Focused Project Brief That Won't Kill Your Website or Digital Transformation Project

Seven Elements of an Effective Brief:

• Start with problems, not solutions: Clearly state the issues before suggesting fixes.
• Define clear objectives and outcomes: Set measurable goals and prioritize them.
• Set a realistic budget early: Transparency saves time and guides scope.
• Get the scope right: Detail features to avoid misunderstandings.
• Understand project phases and timelines: Know your team's involvement.
• Account for modern requirements: Include accessibility, performance, and security.
• Manage contributors and decision-making: Engage IT and key stakeholders from the start.

Read the article below, or watch this episode on YouTube: How to Plan a Website (Without These 7 Costly Errors)

The Hidden Reason Most Digital Projects Fail

Many website projects fail not due to poor design or coding but because of unclear or incomplete project briefs.

The statistics are sobering. Studies consistently show that most digital transformation and IT initiatives miss their targets, often due to misaligned requirements and poor scoping. A recent Boston Consulting Group analysis found that over 30% of large-scale digital projects run over budget or behind schedule (BCG, "Software Projects Don't Have to Be Late, Costly, and Irrelevant," 2024).

The good news, a strong brief is the cheapest way to de-risk your website investment, it aligns web development teams—including web designers, front-end developers, back-end developers, full-stack developers, and other web developer roles—with UX designers to ensure user-centred, efficient outcomes. A well-structured design process is essential for project success, guiding teams through problem identification, solution development, and continuous improvement. A strong user experience can also be a key differentiator in competitive digital markets.

Why Your Brief Matters

A clear project brief helps vendors provide accurate estimates and solutions. Vague briefs lead to costly assumptions and delays. A well-defined brief supports positive UX, strengthens brand trust, and gives your project a competitive edge. Clear briefs help achieve high user satisfaction and customer satisfaction by aligning project goals with user needs and expectations, which can be measured through metrics like CSAT scores. User experience is the overall perception users have when interacting with a product or service, and UX aims to optimize this experience through user-centered design.

What is User Experience (UX) Design?

UX design focuses on creating digital products—websites, apps—that are intuitive, efficient, and enjoyable. Through user research, interaction design, visual design, and usability testing, UX professionals craft experiences that meet user needs and business goals.

Design principles guide the creation of intuitive and accessible user interfaces, ensuring that digital products are both visually appealing and easy to use. Prototyping tools are essential for wireframing and testing design ideas before implementation, allowing teams to refine concepts and improve usability. User interface design focuses on the visual and interactive elements of a product, while user experience encompasses the broader journey and satisfaction of the user. Interface design plays a critical role in shaping user interaction and overall satisfaction with digital platforms.

Role of UX Designers

UX designers bridge user needs and business objectives. They conduct research, create wireframes and prototypes, collaborate with development teams, and iterate based on user feedback to deliver effective, accessible interfaces. UX designers often collaborate with graphic designers to ensure visual appeal and brand consistency. Skills from graphic design, such as color theory and typography, are valuable in UX work. While technology and AI can assist, human designers bring essential creativity and empathy to the UX process. Usability tests and user testing are conducted to observe how users interact with prototypes and identify areas for improvement.

Key Elements of an Effective Project Brief

1. Start with Problems, Not Solutions

This is the most common and costly mistake in project briefs: jumping straight to solutions before clearly articulating the problems you're trying to solve.

Consider these two approaches:

1. Solution-first (problematic): "We need a new CMS."
2. Problem-first (effective): "Our marketing team can't update website content without involving a developer, which means it takes three weeks to publish time-sensitive content. This is causing us to miss campaign windows and lose competitive advantage."

See the difference? The first version assumes the solution. The second version explains the pain, which allows vendors to recommend the most appropriate solution, which might be a new CMS, but could also be upgrading your existing system, implementing better workflows, or providing training.

Common problems worth documenting:

• Content management bottlenecks (requiring developer intervention for basic updates)
• Aging or deprecated technology that's expensive to maintain
• User experience that feels dated or doesn't convert
• Compliance gaps (privacy, accessibility (WCAG AODA/ADA, GDPR)
• Performance issues affecting search rankings or user retention
• Integration challenges between marketing systems

Before writing a single word about what you want to build, conduct an internal workshop to document every pain point, frustration, and inefficiency your current digital presence creates. Be specific. Be honest. This list becomes the "why" behind your project.

2. Define Clear Objectives and Audience

Set measurable goals aligned with business objectives, like reducing publishing time or improving mobile conversions. Define your target audience by identifying primary, secondary, and tertiary audiences—this ensures you gather relevant feedback and that the project meets the needs of your intended users.

Objectives provide direction, while outcomes ensure accountability. Too often, briefs include vague objectives like "Improve user experience" or "Modernize our digital presence," which fail to guide decision-making or measure success effectively.

Instead, define what measurable change you want to achieve:

• Reduce content publishing time
• Achieve WCAG compliance to eliminate accessibility risk
• Improve mobile conversion rate
• Reduce support tickets related to website issues

Not every outcome needs a precise number, but it should be specific enough that both you and your vendor can clearly envision what success looks like.

The priority trap: Here's where most organizations stumble—they list seven "top priorities." Priority, by definition, is singular. You can have critical, high, medium, and low-priority items, but you should only have one critical priority. This forces clarity and prevents scope creep.

The audience framework: When defining objectives, be equally clear about who you're building for. Use a tiered audience approach:

• Primary audience: The people without whom your business wouldn't exist. If this audience disappeared tomorrow, you'd have no business. Define them clearly.
• Secondary audience: Adjacent users who visit your site or use your product but aren't your core business. You could survive without them, but they add value.
• Tertiary audience: Internal teams, government bodies, partners, or constituents who need information but aren't your business focus.

This framework prevents the common mistake of trying to serve everyone equally, which inevitably means serving no one well. If someone asks you to implement a feature that will 10x your budget but only serves your tertiary audience, the answer is simple: don't do it.

3. Set a Realistic Budget Early

This is the most controversial recommendation in this guide, but it's also the most important—include your budget or budget range in your brief.

The resistance to budget transparency usually comes from a belief that hiding your budget gives you negotiating leverage. The reality is the opposite.

Think of your project brief like a job posting. The best job postings include salary ranges because it helps candidates self-qualify. The same logic applies to vendor selection. Sharing your budget helps agencies determine if they're a fit, and if they are, it allows them to shape scope appropriately rather than guess.

Here's a real-world example from our own agency: A non-profit recently approached us with a strict budget cap; it was well below our typical project minimum. Instead of walking away or inflating the quote, we asked: "What can we deliver within this budget that will maximize impact?" We adjusted the scope, cut low-priority features, and delivered a scope of work tailored to their budget and needs. That conversation would never have happened without budget transparency.

The myth of the budget upsell: Some clients worry that agencies will simply fill whatever budget number you give them. In practice, reputable agencies don't operate this way. They have established project minimums and pricing structures. What budget transparency allows agencies to do is have strategic conversations about trade-offs. Should you cut that nice-to-have feature to stay on budget? Should you phase the project differently? Should you consider off-the-shelf tools instead of custom development?

These are valuable conversations that only happen when everyone knows the financial parameters.

What if you genuinely don't know your budget? Then provide a range. Even a wide range is better than nothing. "We have between $50,000 and $150,000 allocated for this project" tells vendors a tremendous amount about project scale and allows them to calibrate their proposals accordingly. It saves everyone time by preventing mismatched expectations.

4. Get the Scope Right

This is where most briefs fall apart completely. Features get listed as single-line items without any depth, detail, or context. The result? Wildly different interpretations and estimates that vary by 200% or more.

Consider a feature as seemingly simple as "member login" What does that actually mean?

• Basic username/password authentication with password reset?
• Single sign-on (SSO) integration with existing enterprise systems?
• SSO plus two-factor authentication plus specific security protocols required by your industry?

The cost difference between these scenarios is enormous, but if your brief simply says "member login," you're asking vendors to guess which one you mean. That's not fair to them or to you.

Another deceptively simple feature. "Events calendar" could mean:

• A simple display calendar showing date, time, and location (relatively straightforward)
• A full event management system with online registration, payment processing, automated confirmation emails, waitlist management, cancellation policies, refund handling, and attendee communication (enterprise-level complexity)

If you custom-build the second version, you're looking at costs that could be 10x your budget. If you use a third-party tool like Eventbrite, you get all that functionality at a fraction of the cost and with better reliability.

Forms are also a silent budget killer. Many clients assume forms will be part of the CMS and that they'll be able to build any form they want, connecting it to various data sources. This is almost never the case out of the box, and building a custom form builder is extraordinarily expensive.

For common features like forms, event management, and payment processing, strongly consider third-party tools:

• Forms: Jotform, Typeform, or Google Forms instead of custom form builders
• Events: Eventbrite or similar platforms instead of custom event systems
• Payments: Stripe, PayPal, or commerce platforms instead of custom payment systems

Custom building these features makes sense only when you have truly unique business logic that off-the-shelf tools can't handle. In most cases, you don't.

For every feature in your brief, ask these questions:

• What exactly does this feature need to do? (List specific functionality)
• Who will use it and how often?
• What data does it need to collect, display, or integrate with?
• Are there off-the-shelf tools that could handle this?
• What's the simplest version that would meet our core needs?

The more specific you can be, the more accurate the estimates you'll receive.

5. Understand Project Phases and Team Commitment

Know the web development process phases—planning, design, development, testing, deployment—and the involvement required from your team, including UX designers and developers.

Digital transformation and website projects aren't something that happens to you—they're something you participate in actively. Understanding the typical phases of a project and your team's required involvement is critical for realistic planning.

This isn't tripling your workload, but it's also not zero effort. Projects typically run four to eight months, and there will be weeks when this project requires focused attention from you and your team.

The question to ask vendors: "What does my team's involvement look like in each phase?" The best clients ask this early, oftentimes as a proposal requirement. They understand their own capacity constraints—that IT is only available for the next month, that the content team is already overloaded, that approvals require executive committee review which happens quarterly.

Content readiness is the #1 cause of project delays. More than technical challenges or design revisions, waiting for content, approvals, and stakeholder sign-offs derails timelines. If your brief acknowledges these potential bottlenecks upfront, vendors can build appropriate timelines and processes to mitigate them.

6. Account for Modern Web Design Requirements

Include accessibility compliance, performance optimization, SEO basics—such as optimizing for search engines to ensure your website is discoverable by your target audience—and security standards to meet legal and user expectations. Visual appeal should be balanced with accessibility and performance to create engaging and inclusive digital experiences.

7. Manage Contributors and Decision-Making

Website and digital transformation projects touch every part of your organization, which means the decisions aren't isolated to marketing. Oftentimes these projects involve marketing, IT, and executive leadership, in varying capacities.

Define who needs to be involved, to what extent, and when:

• IT/Technology teams: They're consistently brought to the table too late, and they always have critical input. Hosting requirements, security protocols, existing infrastructure, integration capabilities—IT perspective is essential from day one, especially at the proposal phase.
• Content teams: Who will create, manage, and maintain the content? What are their workflows? What are their skill levels?
• Leadership/Executive sponsors: Who has final approval authority? What's the approval process?
• Compliance/Legal: What are regulatory requirements? What are risk factors?
• Customer service/Support: What are the most common user issues? What information do customers struggle to find?

Before finalizing your brief, circulate it to every stakeholder group for input. You're not asking for approval; you're asking for gaps, concerns, and requirements you might have missed.

The Discovery Phase: Your Secret Weapon

For complex projects, investing in a discovery phase ($5,000–$15,000) helps gather requirements, assess technology, conduct user research, and create a detailed roadmap, reducing risks and improving outcomes. Tools like Google Analytics can provide valuable insights into current user behaviour during this phase. Resources such as the Nielsen Norman Group and the Interaction Design Foundation offer best practices and training to inform the discovery process.

Putting It All Together

Choose an approach based on project complexity:

• Complex projects: Hire an agency for discovery and blueprint creation.
• Standard projects: Use this guide and validate with experts.
• Minimum viable: Include clear problems, objectives, audience, budget, features, timeline, and decision-makers.

Bottom Line

Clear, detailed project briefs prevent costly overruns and delays. Treat your website or digital transformation as a strategic investment—start with a strong brief to ensure success and deliver superior user experiences that build brand loyalty.

FAQ

What is a project brief for a website or digital transformation project?

A project brief is a short, structured document that explains the problem you're solving, the objectives and outcomes you want, the scope and features, your budget or budget range, timeline expectations, and the key decision-makers. It helps vendors create accurate proposals and prevents costly misalignment.

Why do so many website and digital transformation projects fail?

Most failures stem from unclear requirements, shifting scope, unrealistic budgets, and poor alignment between internal teams and vendors. Studies show up to 70% of digital transformation projects miss their goals, and one in three website projects go over time or budget by 25%+.

What should a website project brief include?

At minimum: clear problem statements, measurable objectives, your primary audience, a budget or budget range, detailed feature requirements (not just feature names), timeline expectations, and the people involved in decisions.

Should I include my budget in a project brief?

Yes. Sharing a realistic budget or range helps agencies self-qualify and propose scope that fits your financial limits. It saves time and prevents mismatched expectations.

What is a discovery phase and do I need one?

A discovery phase is a paid engagement (often $5k–$15k) where an agency works with you to define requirements, audit your tech stack, research users, and produce a clear project roadmap. It's highly recommended for complex, custom or enterprise-scale projects.