How to build a digital experience brief that both sides understand

Most briefs for digital experiences are brand briefs dressed up as product assignments. They describe the feeling the brand wants to create, the audience they want to reach, the message they want to land. What they don't describe is what a user actually does, why they would come back, or how success looks technically or behaviorally.

The result: client and agency spend weeks working from different mental models of what is being built. The client is thinking about a campaign concept. The agency is thinking about an interactive product. Halfway through, those worlds collide.

At Livewall, we design and build digital experiences for consumer brands in retail, FMCG, entertainment, and beyond. We receive dozens of briefs every year. The ones that work well do so for one reason: they make explicit what most briefs leave implicit.

Start with behavior, not feeling

The first thing missing from most briefs is a concrete behavioral objective. Not "we want people to experience our brand values" but: what behavior do you want people to exhibit? And what are they doing now?

This is the foundation of behavior-first design: you design toward a specific behavioral change, not toward a feeling or a message. Do you want people to return? To leave their data? To buy, to share, to learn?

In the HEMA Stapelgek loyalty campaign, the target behavior was clear: customers needed to open the HEMA app more often and register their purchases. That drove every design decision: the game mechanics, the visual language, the frequency of return triggers. Without that behavioral objective, it could have been a fun game with no commercial output.

So write it in the brief: which behavior A do you want to shift to behavior B? How often? For how many people? And what is the baseline today?

The five questions every good brief answers

Beyond the behavioral objective, there are four other questions almost always missing from briefs, but which make the difference between a smooth project and weeks of rework.

1. Who is the user, really, and what do you know about their behavior?

Not a persona poster with a name and an age. But: how do people find this experience? On which device? In what context, at home or on the go? What were they doing before? What do they expect when they start?

For the Decathlon game, we knew users would be playing almost exclusively on mobile, shortly after a store visit. That shaped everything: session length, text density per screen, the type of interaction.

2. What is the technical and organisational environment?

Can the agency choose its own platform? Are integrations needed with existing systems like a CRM, an app, or a point-of-sale? Who manages content after launch? Are there legal constraints like GDPR requirements for data collection?

These are questions clients rarely ask themselves, but they have an enormous impact on technical choices.

3. What are the constraints on time and budget?

Not as a negotiation, but as a design constraint. An experience that needs to go live in six weeks is a different product from one with a six-month runway. Both can be excellent. But they are different. Say so.

4. How do we measure success?

Not just campaign metrics like reach and impressions, but behavioral metrics: return rate, session duration, completion rate, conversion. Agree on these upfront so the agency can design the experience toward those goals from the start.

5. What is out of scope?

This is the most underrated question. What is not allowed? Which channels, which customer data, which brand expressions are off-limits? Knowing what cannot be done early prevents expensive revisions later.

The difference between a campaign brief and a product brief

This is the biggest source of misunderstanding. Many digital experiences sit in a grey zone: they are more than a campaign but less than a fully-fledged product. Clients write them as campaign briefs. Agencies read them as product assignments. That is where the friction starts.

A campaign brief describes what needs to be communicated, to whom, and when. A product brief describes what a user does, what problem that solves, and how the system behaves.

For a digital experience, you need both. You need the campaign side: the concept, the brand experience, the campaign window. And you need the product side: the user flows, the technical constraints, the data requirements.

Write both. Or explicitly state which part the agency is expected to fill in. At Livewall, we often complete the product portion ourselves based on the campaign brief. But that only works when the client knows we are doing it, and agrees that we should.

What a good brief looks like in practice

A brief does not need to be long. The best ones we have received were three pages. But they all contained the following:

• A concrete behavioral objective (not just a brand objective)
• A description of the user in context: device, moment, expectation
• The technical constraints: integrations, platforms, data management
• A timeline with room for iteration
• Success criteria that are behaviorally measurable
• An explicit statement of what is out of scope

For projects like Proximus+ World, the engagement started with a joint briefing session in which we as the agency actively helped write the product brief. That cost half a day extra at the start. It saved weeks later in the project.

That is the investment a good brief requires: a little more time upfront, so that everyone is working in the same direction from that point on.

What Livewall does when the brief is incomplete

An incomplete brief is not the end of the conversation. It is the beginning of it. At Livewall, we run a standard set of questions at the start of every new project, based on the five points above. We call it internally the brief check.

The goal is not to correct the client. It is to arrive together at a shared understanding of what is being built, for whom, and what success looks like. That conversation, early in the process, is the most efficient investment both sides can make.

Because the real cost of a bad brief is not paid when you write it. It is paid halfway through the project, when course-correcting is expensive.

If you are working on a digital strategy or building an interactive campaign, start with the brief. And if you are not sure how, get in touch.