Table Of Content
Talking to people about your designs might seem like a basic skill, but it can be difficult to do well. In many cases, how you communicate with stakeholders, clients, and other nondesigners may be more important than the designs themselves. T get their support, your work will never see the light of dayâ?? It’s as if our brains go on autopilot when it comes to making design decisions. A dancer might have a difficult time describing how she moves because she has done it so much that she just knows how to do it. Likewise, we tend to create things that we just know to be the right solution; perhaps it is our preference, maybe it’s based on experience, or maybe it was unconsciously picked up from observing users.
Be open to feedback
It calls for effective communication and reasoning skills to be able to convey the thought process behind the design decisions to clients, stakeholders, and team members. The growth of the UX designer has changed our role in so many ways, none more so than the need to explain ourselves to other people who don’t share our experience in design. The good news is I got that job, and I’ve had many other jobs since then, but I never forgot that mistake. I was not astute enough to recognize that my stakeholder had a different agenda than my own.
Talking My Way Into Design
So, it's key to use clear and concise language that is easy to understand and communicate ideas in a way that resonates with them. By doing so, you establish a shared understanding and foster a collaborative relationship. Discussing design decisions creates an open and collaborative environment, unlocking a wealth of insightful ideas. It allows designers to tap into a diverse range of perspectives that they may not have considered previously. A culture of creativity and innovation is thus fostered, paving the way for unique solutions.
Chapter 6: Form a Response
It’s less about solving problems and more about popularity. If you don’t have time for the entire book, just read this section. I’m confident you’ll learn 50% of what the whole book has to teach you. What happens when you take an industry full of creative, right-brained thinkers and thrust them into the middle of a product cycle with usability problems and business goals? Well, it’s no surprise that there is a disconnect between what the other stakeholders want to do and what the designer has so carefully crafted. The good news is that developers are used to helping the business solve problems with technology.
So, let’s jump right in by first going all the way back to the 1990s. Closely aligned with the growth of the web to serve products and experiences is a new business approach in which entire organizations arrange themselves to value design and make it a part of their core culture. As startups and big corporation CEOs are beginning to value design, we see an organizational model that makes it possible for businesses to really hone in on and make product design their primary strength.
Thanks to Apple, everyone began expecting everything to be well-designed. Suddenly, the demand for designers who knew how to create great experiences exploded. As design-centric social media skyrocketed, too, designers were able to create just about any interface they could think of and share it with the world.
This is why so many people have an opinion about design - O'Reilly Media
This is why so many people have an opinion about design.
Posted: Wed, 07 Oct 2015 07:00:00 GMT [source]
A Shift Toward Products
Brief in form but comprehensive in scope, definitely worth reading in its entirety. I think every time you talk to anyone about anything (with you family, friends and strangers on the street), you should do it the way described in this chapter. Contents of Tom Greever’s “Articulating Design Decisions” isn’t anything extraordinary, nor magic, yet a compilation of well-know facts and truths. At the same time, it must be admitted that the author’s work, although it could be more clearly articulated on much less pages — pun intended — is practical and sufficiently insightful.
Chapter 5: Get in the Right Mindset
Whatever the reason, when someone is good at what they do, they have a hard time telling people why they did what they did. Because if you can’t get their support, your work will never see the light of day—no matter how good it is. Being mindful of the language you use when communicating your design decisions to clients and stakeholders is important. Often, they don't come from a design background, and using jargon and technical terms may confuse them.
We have to find a way to talk about it and arrive at a final decision. Context is a crucial aspect of effective design communication. To ensure that your clients understand and appreciate your design decisions, it is essential to provide a clear and concise explanation of how they align with project goals, user needs, and business objectives.
To take it a step further, we don’t have to look far to see how digital products have fueled uprisings and revolutions in places such as Syria, Turkey, Egypt, and even Ferguson, Missouri in the United States. In these situations, the use of digital products became the voice of the people and upset the political balance. An interface designed by someone in a meeting with stakeholders became a tool for empowering an entire population toward revolution. As a result, you have designers who started out somewhere else, creating stuff that was mostly focused on the look and feel.
When the web took over everything, organizations, large and small, were on a much more level playing field in terms of reaching their audience. Everyone wanted and needed a website, designers hurried to meet the need, learned basic skills, and began pumping out websites to meet demand. For the first time, the world of HCI and interface design that started in the tech companies of Silicon Valley was available to a much wider group of creators who had no idea what they were doing. To understand how designers fit into corporate culture, we need to understand the changing shift and attitudes toward design as something more than just an aesthetic.
Hopefully Canon listens to buyers, removes Touch Bar on upcoming EOS R cameras - Stark Insider
Hopefully Canon listens to buyers, removes Touch Bar on upcoming EOS R cameras.
Posted: Wed, 09 Jan 2019 08:00:00 GMT [source]
That’s a good shift, but even research can be biased, unintentionally flawed, or otherwise inconclusive. This adds complexity to the challenge of talking about design and UX. There is an entire ecosystem of custom-built applications with terrible interfaces that companies must support with an army of developers and training staff. Designers are now being asked to redesign these applications, work with the developers entrenched in legacy systems, and create a better product.
By contextualizing your design choices in this way, you can demonstrate the rationale behind your decisions. Starting with the "why" before delving into the "what" and "how" ensures that you begin from the base, which is the root problem. When you clearly articulate the problems that you are seeking to solve, you build context around why certain design decisions were taken. This helps clients understand the reasoning behind your choices and how it aligns with their business goals. It establishes trust and credibility and paves way for a successful partnership.
As we look at how to talk about design to nondesigners, I want to first provide the context to help us understand how we got here in the first place. My own career has been littered with experiences (good and bad) of articulating design decisions to stakeholders. Those experiences shaped my understanding of design and helped me to see the importance of communication in the process. In addition, the term “UX” hasn’t been around that long.
Agile working styles demand that designers deliver faster and faster, so asynchronous feedback will become the new norm. There are a few ideas from the book that can be taken into the new async world, but most will have to be left behind. Today, businesses and even entire industries are built around the “disruption” of creating a better user experience. The way that you succeed in business is to find an existing category and then tweak the user experience to the nth degree.
Then there is (1) a list of tips for working with designers, (2) design project checklist, that might be useful. Tenth chapter is the most insightful chapter from all of them. Bikeshedding and Atwood’s Duck are few of many examples of great writing and giving valuable observations and knowledge.
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