Articulating Design Decisions

Product Information

The types of decisions a designer makes during the design process will vary depending on an organization’s size and the product’s maturity. If we’re going to be successful at communicating with people about our designs, we must be able to answer these three questions about our work: When presenting design decisions, it's important to use real-world examples and to show how your design choices will improve the user's experience.” - Tom Greever To do this effectively, make this connection clear and provide an explanation for how your solution solves this particular problem. Because you’ve already written down each problem alongside your solution (as I recommended in Chapter 2), and part of your strategy is to appeal to a nobler motive, it should be a simple matter of making a statement that clearly communicates these connections. A pattern for expressing this is: “[design] will affect [goal] because [reason].” Here are some examples: 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.

The challenge with user observation as a justification for design decisions is that it can be very subjective, based on what you remember of the session, and difficult to document for the purpose of meeting with a client. Usually, the way we bring these to our stakeholders is in the form of a memory—some special knowledge that might only reside in our heads; for example, “During our usability study last week, we realized that people were confusing the ‘Okay’ and ‘Cancel’ buttons because the design was too similar.” Even though this statement is based on our experience with users, it is undoubtedly clouded by our own memory and conclusions from the study. Still, it’s an effective way to demonstrate that you’re interacting with users and improving your designs to accommodate what you’ve learned. That alone is very valuable to communicate. I passed the first interview with someone from HR who wouldn’t really know whether I was qualified or not. She was just a gatekeeper. I passed the technical interview because I knew how to use design software and could easily show my skills. I passed the third interview with the director of marketing because she liked my portfolio and I was good at talking about it. So far so good! By this point, I had a lot of confidence. There I was: fresh out of college, interviewing for a manager role at a decent-sized company, doing the thing that I loved so much. I probably thought I knew a lot about design.Also, as someone who’s digested a fair few parenting books/podcasts, I was actually surprised and amused at how similar various techniques where when discussing with your child vs discussing with clients/coworkers 😄 Telling your stakeholders that you’re limited by resources will either result in sobering agreement or righteous indignation. Either way, it can yield a good outcome. On the one hand, they’re apt to agree with you because they understand the realities of the resourcing situation. On the other hand, they might be compelled to fight on your behalf for additional resources to make it happen. The point isn’t really the final outcome, though, as much as it is your ability to thoughtfully explain the reality and constraints within which you’re working. We must always design around our limits in resourcing. “LIMITED BY TECHNOLOGY” 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. The awkwardness of UX’s adolescence could not be any clearer than it is in our relationships and interactions with developers.

Much of design is imitation. For example, designers rely on universally recognized design patterns to solve fundamental usability issues. You’ll find variations of these UI patterns across multiple products and industries. 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. As often as we’re justifying our decisions based on what we think needs to be done, we are also making a case for times when there are limitations that need to be taken into consideration. We can’t always do what our clients want, simply because of other factors that are beyond our control or because we’re trying to adhere to standards in design and programming. I’ve found three common responses for dealing with limitations:Don't assume that your design decisions are self-explanatory. Take the time to explain your thought process and the reasoning behind your choices."- Tom Greever The problem with traditional image-based design tools is that they make poor prototypes. Designers are limited by what they can create and test–making it challenging to articulate design decisions and get buy-in. There may be some confusing examples if you aren’t familiar with UX or software development, but the principles could certainly be carried over to many other fields. 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?

Based on what you know about the people you’re working with, you should be able to anticipate how they will react to your designs. In the previous chapter, we identified the influencers on our projects and called out some of their values and motivations. When we combine what we know about their perspective with the values they carry in their role, we can make some pretty good guesses about how they’ll respond to our designs. The good news is that most people are fairly predictable. That is, they tend to obsess over and react to the same kinds of things every single time. If you’ve met with them before, anticipating their reaction becomes much easier. It will take a few meetings to really hone in on how people are wired, but I’ve found that anticipating reactions is much more formulaic and predictable than you might expect. During the early stages of the design process, designers use sketches and paper prototypes to iterate on many ideas fast. During this phase, UX designers and collaborators use experience and intuition to drive decision-making based on the problems they’ve identified during user research.

Likewise, we need to structure design meetings in a way that is similar to the way we structure any customer journey—remove distractions and design the meeting to reduce the potential for cognitive fatigue. Providing visibility into the current status along the journey can be helpful. Greever suggests utilizing a horizontal chart or timeline—similar to what you might use to show progress in designing a sign-up process. To avoid distractions, knowing your audience, their key concerns, and what they’ll fixate on is critical. Be aware of those things that would draw their attention away from your agenda and remove them.

Mirela argues that designers must become better communicators, using analogies and storytelling to relate with stakeholders, product managers, and developers. These people often don’t understand user experience or design thinking, so they don’t have the framework to understand the “why” behind design decisions. Using user stories This book is for designers at any level that wants to learn practical tactics for articulating designs to stakeholders who may be less knowledgeable about design. Additionally, developers can benefit from learning practical tips to improve communication with designers and stakeholders. About the book You absolutely have to be doing it from the beginning…We’re not accustomed to asking ourselves the right questions as we work.” The difference is that the interface they used previously for solving these problems never mattered much. As long as you could teach someone how to use it, it was good enough. We didn’t need effective design, we needed documentation and training. The answer to a design problem was to educate the user. If we can help users understand the system, then they will know how to use it.Hopefully, now you can see how design decisions across different projects frequently share a similar rationale and explanation. As designers and communicators, our jobs are made easier when we have this short list of common messages to pull from, using them as the foundation for our response. Use them as templates to help you jumpstart your response, no matter what the context. Communicate with stakeholders, keep your sanity, and deliver the best user experience. Who should read this book