Articulating Design Decisions

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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 Perhaps the biggest factor, though, in the explosive growth of UX as a discipline is the personalization and shrinking of the devices we use to interact with the world on a daily basis. Sitting at a computer is not a terribly personal experience. It is a separate device at arm’s length, with physical controls that one must learn to manipulate. The input methods are indirect: what I do down there with the mouse changes what I see up here on the display. And at the end of the day, I have to put my computer away and move on with my life. Something as simple as looking up the weather on a computer must be done purposefully and intentionally. This book is a required read for anyone who works on a design team or has to communicate their ideas up the food chain. UX and interface design have become germane topics in coffeeshops and board rooms alike. We need to be able to speak competently, confidently, and humbly in all contexts. This book helps give us the visual and spoken language to ensure everyone sees a design solution from the right perspective. If you’re thinking, “But, Hannah, ‘good design speaks for itself,’” then Greever explains why that simply isn’t true. But there are a lot of great ideas and recommendations for staying professional, being articulate, and achieving the best possible results while building and maintaining great relationships with your coworkers/clients.

Part of anticipating how people will react is preparing in advance the alternatives that you considered or that you think will be suggested. You’ll remember from Chapter 2 that one of the questions we’re trying to answer for our stakeholders is: Why is this better than the alternative?Discount for UXmatters Readers—Buy Articulating Design Decisions from O’Reilly Media, using the discount code AUTHD, and save 50% off the retail price for the ebook and 40% off the print book.

But why does this matter? If we are the experts, why should we have to justify our decisions to nondesigners? The reason is that UX has gone “mainstream,” in the organization and even within pop culture. The most popular and interesting companies have put design at the fore-front of their product offering, creating a buzz culture that drools over every new release and a fan following that promotes their brand for them. I’m not only thinking of Apple, but also brands such as IKEA, innovators like Tesla, and unique problem-solving designs from Dyson, Segway, or Nest. These brands command respect, elicit strong opinions, and foster loyalty from the people who follow them. SOCIAL MEDIA HAS CHANGED HOW PEOPLE VIEW DIGITAL PRODUCTS I completely agree with you that we need to find a solution for ________.” Agree that there is a problem to be solved, and reinforce that you’re listening to them. It’s a reminder that you can be trusted with those things and that we can move on to bigger issues. Another tactic is to remove distractions in your presentation that may cause the discussion to go off course.It can be difficult to know with certainty how a particular design will affect your goals, especially for smaller interactions that might not affect the overall use of the entire application. The point here is not to know with certainty. If we always knew with certainty what would definitely accomplish our goals, we wouldn’t need to even meet. You need to have confidence that your experience leads you to believe with all reasonable certainty that this design is at least one step of a larger approach that will take you where you need to go. 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. Because if you can't get their support, your work will never see the light of day--no matter how good it is. 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?” Because I deal with the financial world, my product has a series of legal requirements and not all of them I agreed to have.

As far as I can tell, the term “user experience design” emerged in the 90s as a branch of human-computer interaction (HCI), information architecture (IA) and other software-design disciplines revolving around the practice of usability. The term itself is frequently credited to Don Norman. 1 Although the ideas and influences for UX have been around since the 1950s in Henry Dreyfuss’ “Designing for People,” 2 it was not until Apple released the first iPod and then the first iPhone in 2007 3 that the term came into widespread use as the role of a designer who is creating the entire end-to-end experience using a user-centered design philosophy.

Chapter 4: Reducing Cognitive Load

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. This is why so many people have an opinion about your work. PERSONAL DEVICES HAVE CHANGED HOW PEOPLE VIEW DIGITAL PRODUCTS 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 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. When our job was to make the company look good, it didn’t matter as much who got their way on the final design. Now that we’re solving problems that affect the bottom line, everyone has an opinion on the best way to solve it. I was stumped. Silent. Not only did I know that she was right, but she had exposed my superficial design ego in a way that made me feel small and completely clueless about the thing that I was most confident in—my ability to talk about design. Them: “I don’t like the color of this button” You: “So what I hear you’re saying is that if someone wants to schedule a meeting, they may have a tough time based on the design of that button. Am I hearing you correctly?” You’re confirming that you hear them and are willing to do something about it. A friend of mine who is actually in the UX field recommended this book to me. I have an interest in UX, but am in the accounting field myself. For more tips on articulating design decisions, you can listen to the full podcast episode here on iTunes or here on SoundcloudDesign teams also reference competitors, industry standards, accessibility guidelines, and other external sources to formulate decisions about solving specific user problems. How to Make Good Design Decisions Start with research While being wrong might give the impression that the bonds of trust will be broken, it’s actually an opportunity to raise the level of trust if you admit that you made a mistake." These are the key messages that you need to communicate to deliver on your strategy and achieve the objective. With our strategy and tactics in mind, find the messages that apply most to your situation and modify them to accommodate your particular context. The goal for this chapter is to give you a list of common ways of describing design decisions that you can use and reuse at each meeting: a set of templates to give you a head start toward forming the best response. 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: