When you zoom out, design decision-making is a complex process involving multiple factors and considerations. 4 Ways Designers Make Decisions

One of the best ways to make a case for your designs is to directly connect it to the needs of the business. Here are three of the most common responses for appealing to the business: Clear communication fosters a collaborative approach and ensures that everyone is aligned toward a common design goal. This unified effort unleashes the full potential of the design team, paving the way for unparalleled creativity, and innovative ideas. 4. Provides ready referencesIntuition can inspire designs and decision-making, particularly early in the design process, which relies on out-of-the-box thinking and making many decisions fast. In television, it’s common to have prearranged ringers on programs. Whether it’s a news broadcast, talk show, or reality TV, there are always people whose answer or reaction the show’s producers have prearranged. They might need help building energy and momentum to make the show feel more interesting. The ringer might be the anchor who asks a good question of a reporter that he didn’t cover in the initial story. Or the ringer could be an audience member asking a question to communicate something that’s more effective coming from an average person than the expert host. Whatever the case, a ringer’s purpose is to bolster support for an idea. Title: Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience Why is this skill so important? Here are just a few reasons: It helps to build consensus and alignment within a team. Knowing where others have failed prevents designers from duplicating design decisions that don’t work. Conversely, documenting the process behind design decisions implemented by previous designers will help future teams understand why the solution exists the way it does.

To get the attention of your stakeholders, it’s important to begin your response with a phrase that emphasizes your use of data, such as:One example is designing for accessibility. When you’re building an accessible application, it will inform decisions about the kinds of controls you choose and how those interactions are implemented in the design. We usually begin with a no-limits design that, as soon as implementation is underway, gets whittled down into what’s actually possible, given our desire to make the app work for everyone. Even though nearly anything is technically possible, it might not always be recommended (or it might take too much time to accomplish), and so we must adjust our expectations to account for these needs. Often the best way to articulate design decisions is by showing stakeholders using prototypes. When stakeholders experience how your design solves a problem, they’re more likely to trust your decision-making. As mobile phone growth turned powerful smartphones into touch-screen super phones, our ability to interact with products and services on a regular basis shifted from being an intentional, arm’s-length, conscious choice to an automatic muscle-memory involuntary jerk of the wrist. Like social media, our devices are intensely personal and are becoming more intimate. Our interface with the world is no longer the machine at arm’s length. It’s the touchable glossy display that we always have with us. Always on, always connected, always shaping the way we see our world. As a result, universal understanding of the importance of UX has grown, too. Every software update introduces new ideas and elicits strong opinions from every user. This is why so many people have an opinion about your work. STARTUP CULTURE HAS CHANGED HOW PEOPLE VIEW DIGITAL PRODUCTS As with agendas, the degree to which you need to practice will vary depending on the importance of the meeting. A big presentation with the CEO should be practiced a lot. A daily meeting with your boss will require less, but it’s still a good idea if there are issues that might be difficult to discuss or if you’re unsure how you might say it. For a big meeting, I might book the meeting room the day before so that I can practice in the same environment as much as I need to. For a simple phone call with my boss, I might stand at my desk and talk through the agenda once or twice to build my confidence. You have to decide how much practice is necessary to ensure you have the mental capacity to be articulate in the moment. Point to the goals that we’re all trying to solve. “If our goal is to increase conversion, then changing this button color is going to negatively affect that.” As designers, we want to solve problems and achieve goals, we just need to bring that to the forefront so that people are aware of this. You can focus on motives that will appeal to the things that are important to the roles of the people at meetings.

To effectively articulate design decisions, it's important to be able to explain how your design choices align with the overall goals and strategy of the organization."- Tom Greever 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. Everyone wants it, but getting there isn’t easy. IT’S A NEW CHALLENGE Empathy can sometimes be a controversial term within the UX community. Although it is true that it is nearly impossible for a UX professional to have had the same experiences as a customer or stakeholder, we can certainly gain insights into their motivations and different perspectives. Schools are responding to the changing demand for designers by offering courses in information architecture, interface design, and usability testing techniques, and rightly so. But, the majority of people working in UX today didn’t come from a school that specialized in the field nor did we take a class to teach us a user-centered approach. We migrated into UX from other areas within the company: marketing, IT, design, research. Even human behaviorists and psychologists are finding their relevance in the explosive field called UX. IT’S A NEW ROLE This book sits at the intersection of the growing UX design industry and the digital product business, where designers transitioning from making pretty pictures to creating great user experiences meet with developers, managers, and executives whose agenda and perspective may, at times, be at odds. 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. Design Is Subjective...Sort of

I highly recommend this book for any designers out there who are sometimes baffled by how their conversations with stakeholders go off the rails. Designers make a lot of decisions based purely on intuition. In fact, our intuition is really good at solving design problems in an elegant and simple way. We’re wired to think visually, to organize elements logically for the user, and to pay careful attention to the details. The problem is that because design is subjective and because we don’t always understand how our intuition connects to the problem at hand, we’re unable to adequately tell other people why we did what we did, and that’s one of our biggest failures. 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. 2. Use simple language 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. 5. Encourages creative problem-solving