Before the day · Page 21
The shape: user, context, goal
For you only
A good brief defines three things and then stops: the user, their context, and their goal. Nothing about the solution. The solution belongs to the teams. That is the point of the day.
Compare two versions. First the bad one:
Build something to help users find outfits they love.
You have nothing. You do not know who the user is, when they show up, or what success looks like. Now the one I used with Ionian:
How might we help a returning 25-year-old Zara shopper open the app at 7:45 a.m. and choose a complete outfit from her saved looks and today's feed in under 90 seconds?
Take it apart, because every piece is carrying weight.
"A returning 25-year-old Zara shopper" is the user, and she is a person, not a segment. Returning means she has saved looks and history, so this is not an onboarding problem. The named brand does work that a persona deck cannot: everyone in the room pictures her in the first second. And you can cast her. Five people who roughly match are findable near any office by Thursday.
"Open the app at 7:45 a.m." is the context. Morning rush. Wardrobe open, coffee in one hand, out the door in twenty minutes. That timestamp sets constraints no feature list could: one thumb, no patience for browsing, decision fatigue before the day even starts.
"Choose a complete outfit from her saved looks and today's feed" is the goal plus the material she already has. Saved looks and the feed are product facts, not solutions. They tell the teams what world they are building in, not what to build.
"In under 90 seconds" is the finish line. At 15:30 you can sit a real user down and start a timer. Either she has an outfit at 90 seconds or she does not. The judges' first question gets answered by observation instead of opinion.
Just as important is what the sentence leaves out. No screen. No feature. No "AI stylist". Four teams could take this brief and come back with four different products, and all four would have served it. That spread is what you want.
Tight enough to aim, loose enough to discover.