How to brief a designer without writing a spec

A brief is not a specification. You are not describing the website, you are describing the problem precisely enough that someone else can solve it. Most briefs fail by doing the opposite: a lot of detail about pages, almost none about the business.

Start with the decision

What does a visitor have to decide, and what is stopping them? If the answer is "they do not trust us yet", that is a different site from "they do not understand what we do".

Bring the awkward constraints

The things you are tempted to leave out are the ones that change the work.

• Who has to approve it, and what they care about.
• What cannot change — a system, a logo, a supplier.
• The date something has to be live for, and why.

Do not design it for them

"A hero with a video and three columns" closes off the solution before anyone has looked at the problem. Say what the section has to achieve and let the person you hired decide the shape.

What good looks like

Bring two sites you think work and say why — not "I like this one". The reason is the useful part, and it is usually not visual.