Articulating Design Decisions

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Often, we have experience watching people use our designs, and those insights inform our decision making. Being intentional about realizing when those studies are influencing our decisions will help us to communicate to our stakeholders, when appropriate. Demonstrating good design through a connection with a usability study is a very effective way of making a case for your designs because it shows that your ideas are working in the real world with real people. It has a human element to it that creates a story for our stakeholders, rather than the mechanical feeling that raw data provides. Depending on your stakeholders, using real stories of users might be even more effective than numbers and charts. Using the tactic from Chapter 7 for representing the user, tell your stakeholders a story about your users that will get them on board with your decision. 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. Design decisions are an integral aspect of any design process. Each decision can be split into two parts –the decision-making, and the decision-articulating. While design expertise can help designers succeed in the first part, the second part requires more than just design prowess. 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.

Stakeholders always appreciate connecting your solution to the goals of the business. This is a solid way to make the case for your design through appealing to a nobler motive. This may very well be your answer to the question, “What problem does this solve?” because usually the problems we want to solve with the design are the same as the goals of the project or business overall. Whatever the source of the reasoning, always emphasize that your design is intended to help the company achieve its goals.UX has come a long way in this regard. People understand that our decisions need to be founded in some sort of explainable logic. We are much better at using research to support our ideas so that we remove some of the subjectivity from the equation. 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. Businesses Don’t Critique When presenting design decisions, it's important to be clear, concise, and to the point. Avoid jargon and technical terms that may confuse your audience."- Tom Greever

One of Tom Greever's main points in Articulating Design Decisions is that great design solves a problem, is easy for users, and is supported by everyone on the team (and that we often forget that last part). The skills Tom describes are aimed at learning from our stakeholders so that we can better understand their goals, and present design work that gets buy-in from everyone involved. As you'd expect from someone writing about this topic, Tom provides clear direction on how to develop these skills for yourself, and approachable examples that drive home how to put them into practice day-to-day. One thing that helped me a lot to do this was to bring the project as closely as possible with all partner areas: design system, content design, business and technology. So when my project was presented in the discussions, we could talk about what we could evolve from what we have today. What to say when the CEO is obsessing over a minute detail that isn’t relevant to the meeting’s purpose: UX artifacts that describe users’ stories are excellent for getting stakeholders to understand problems and empathize. User personas help humanize users, while journey maps and storyboards illustrate their challenges. Although it is less important to the overall user experience, I often find myself justifying design decisions based solely on the branding standards of the organization. Sometimes, things are the way they are because the company has a specific image it’s trying to establish and our applications have to reflect this, as well. This is more true with the use of color, fonts, or language than with specific interactions but it’s important to call out. If you chose that style because that’s what the marketing department told you to do, bring that to the attention of your stakeholders.Stakeholders will spend a disproportionate amount of time on issues that are not critical to the project." In some ways, there is an arrogance that prevents us from being truly productive with people outside of our own peers. We don’t always see the other stakeholders on our project as knowing anything valuable about design. We don’t trust their instincts the way we trust our own. After all, we’re the experts. We were hired to design things because that’s what we’re good at doing. Why should managers care? Can’t they just trust us to do our jobs? Just as often, we try to optimize the primary use case by minimizing and limiting secondary or edge cases. For example, although any user is encouraged to maintain his account profile information, it is not the main purpose of the application. This informs our decision to put account management functions in a drop-down menu rather than a large call to action. Noting these justifications can help you keep people focused on ensuring that the primary use case is always optimized even in the face of other needs and features. Putting ‘Recent Projects’ at the top of the home screen will improve data quality because users will have easier access to keeping their data current.” Talking to people about your designs might seem like a basic skill, but it can be difficult to do efficiently and well. And, in many cases, how you communicate about your work with stakeholders, clients, and other non-designers is more critical than the designs themselves—simply because the most articulate person usually wins.

Articulating design decisions is about creating an environment in which stakeholders can see the expertise and thought process of the designers so that they want to agree with them. It’s about creating trust, demonstrating effectiveness, and doing so in a way that’s compelling and convincing. Chapter highlights ⭐️ Chapter 1 — A Maturing IndustryWhat I like about the book, firstly, is that it underlays out patchy general knowledge about good communication and meetings with a clear structure. You've heard about some of the topics here and there; likely you've been practicing certain ways without putting much thought into it. It just seems natural, and a lot of it boils down to common sense and to just being attentive to people and the environment. Getting a well-structured overview is very helpful, though. Finally, I really appreciate attention to language, to wording. That's where a subtle difference can have significant impact. It was great to have longish examples/scripts of conversations. Often, we have design reasons for why we did what we did. I find there are three common ways of describing my decision for design reasons: We need to confess the mistake with the humility we have and speak openly about it, letting people know that when you have a problem in the project, you will say it as soon as possible so that the improvement is made as soon as possible. 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