Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your .. Tom Greever

Table Of Content

• Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience
• Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience
• Review: Articulating Design Decisions by Tom Greever
• Visuals are key
• Talking My Way Into Design
• Be open to feedback
• Chapter 7: Choose a Message

She had come from Proctor & Gamble and had a reputation for doing some great work. In fact, you probably didn’t want to mess with her at all. It was a little intimidating, but having passed all the other tests, I thought I had nothing to fear. Get a set of business-sized reference cards with a brief overview of the important principles in the book. Take O’Reilly with you and learn anywhere, anytime on your phone and tablet. There are also live events, courses curated by job role, and more.

Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience

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.

Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience

It helps them better align their design decisions with business goals and ensure every design decision serves a business purpose. The final product thus meets clients' vision and requirements in all aspects. It’s not only physical products that have transformed our understanding of the value of UX within the organization.

Review: Articulating Design Decisions by Tom Greever

It’s not at all the same as talking to someone who doesn’t have the same level of interest in design. It’s not necessarily the right way to talk to a nondesigner. One of the valuable things about art school is learning to critique someone else’s work and to receive critique from others. When everything is subjective, it’s healthy to analyze one’s work in an environment where everyone is on the same intellectual page, as far as the subject goes. It’s beneficial for two people who share the same vocabulary to discuss their work and make each other better.

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.

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]

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

As such we understand the challenges in getting everyone on the same page and the need for articulating design decisions well. An open and receptive mindset is essential when articulating your design decisions. It is possible for designers to feel attached to their designs and get defensive when critical feedback is given. While you must prepare to defend your design decisions, it's equally important to acknowledge that there may be better solutions that can refine the design.

Be open to feedback

A prerequisite for a good brainstorming session is that the team be clear about the challenges they need to solve and the objectives they must achieve. When lead designers communicate this effectively, they steer the design team in the right direction. Articulating design decisions is a crucial soft skill for a designer to be effective and successful.

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.

Eighth chapter is basically a closing summary of chapters 6 and 7. It does however contain an extensive table of example messages used in very specific situations. Yet, I’d argue that without additional context and/or background behind each case, this ‘dataset’ is somehow unusable in building/ polishing your design articulation arsenal. O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers. Perfect for teams to watch and discuss the ideas in the book.

You must be willing to embrace feedback and listen to them positively. By documenting the design decisions and the reasoning behind them, designers can create a reference point for the future. Whether a client wants to revisit a certain design decision or designers want to reflect on their choice, these records serve as ready references. Well-documented design decisions act as a record of information that the design team can leverage for similar projects in the future.

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.

It is the lens they use to connect and communicate with their friends and family. It’s a powerful social engine that frames every modern conversation. And so it’s no surprise that the details of how the interface works elicits strong reactions from people who perceive it almost as an intrusion into the way they live their lives. For the first time, people who previously barely noticed the design of their favorite website now are obsessed with the smallest interface details of other apps.

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.

It’s important to know how the evolution of this term affects our ability to talk about our work with others. Of critical importance, however, is the shift that’s taken place in organizations from seeing design as merely a utility to being a fully engaged partner in the product development cycle. Similarly, web and mobile interfaces have transitioned from being only platforms for products to being the product themselves. All of these factors greatly influence design within companies, teams, and the minds of our stakeholders.

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.