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

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I know it sounds crazy, but I really enjoy interviewing for jobs. I applied for just about anything and I said yes to every interview. It was a low-risk opportunity to practice talking about my work. Sometimes, I would go to interviews for jobs that I knew I didn’t want. Why? I enjoyed learning how to talk to people in those kinds of meetings and built up a vocabulary for discussing design with others. Once, I actually negotiated a salary for a web design job that I had no intention of accepting, simply because I wanted to see if I could get the manager to offer me a higher salary. He didn’t (in fact, he laughed at me), but it was exciting for me to push those boundaries and see just how skillful I could be at convincing him that I was worth it. One of these requirements was to explain the fees and interest in an extremely detailed way and with a lot of complicated information that made it difficult for the user to understand.

Greever's critical point in his book is that design is about much more than creating something that looks good. It is about making useful things. Additionally, it’s about solving problems and meeting the needs of users as well. In explaining your design decisions, you must explain how your design solves a problem and why you feel it is the best solution for your target audience. Likewise, prepare data (analytics, usability reports) to support any part of your proposal. It’s one thing to make a suggestion, but it’s another thing altogether to show the data that supports your ideas. Most of the time, it’s enough to simply let everyone know that your decisions are based on data, but you must also be prepared to show that data, if it’s in question. Actually, I don’t recommend pulling out the data unless it’s necessary to make your case. Using data to bolster your position is helpful when people disagree or when they react to your designs with skepticism. Because you’re only anticipating how they will react at this point, have the data available, prepare it in advance, and know that you’re basing your decision on it, but don’t slap it on the table during the course of your presentation. Data is very powerful (almost too powerful) and using it all the time can create an environment in which no one wants to suggest anything different. You may stifle the conversation before it even gets started. So, be prepared to defend your decisions with data, but don’t use it unless it’s necessary to make your case. Here are a few sources and articles that might be worth reading as follow-up to the topic of articulating design decisions: The awkwardness of UX’s adolescence could not be any clearer than it is in our relationships and interactions with developers. To make matters worse, we may be the only people in the room without a specific, articulated justification for our choices. Developers make choices based on what’s possible or how to maximize their time and code. Executives want to do what is going to make the company the most money, and so they propose things that they think will accomplish that. Marketing wants you to make changes so that everything is consistent and on-brand. But, unless you’re prepared to defend your decisions intelligently, the only thing you can say is that you disagree. That degree of subjectivity has to change. A Shift Toward Products

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

She quizzed me on my portfolio, which I easily defended. She asked me about my past experience and ran through my resume, which I gladly bragged about. But then she got down to the point. She made a transition from interviewer to client and asked me the most memorable question of my career: “Let’s say I have a new project for you. What’s the first thing you would ask me about it?” Yes, you don't have to lie to me, everyone already did this sometime before! But let’s face the main fact of this topic: every design has limitations. UX designers reference user research such as personas, customer journeys, empathy maps, and problem statements throughout the design process to keep users at the forefront of decision-making. Using data and analytics 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

Conclusion

When you zoom out, design decision-making is a complex process involving multiple factors and considerations. 4 Ways Designers Make Decisions We must identify conversational patterns where it is necessary to employ methods to keep our focus on task." The types of decisions a designer makes during the design process will vary depending on an organization’s size and the product’s maturity. Communicate with stakeholders, keep your sanity, and deliver the best user experience. Who should read this book