Articulating Design Decisions

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Your designs are not the best solution: it is hard to accept but it is possible that our design is not the best option. We need to remember that our stakeholders and leaders were placed in positions of authority for a reason and they are often ultimately responsible for our successes and failures. In his book “Articulating Design Decisions”, Tom Greever, design leader, author, and speaker, talks about the importance of clearly communicating and justifying design decisions to clients and team members. Here are some key insights from the book on why articulating design decisions is beneficial for both designers and clients. 1. Clarifies design objectives 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. The types of decisions a designer makes during the design process will vary depending on an organization’s size and the product’s maturity. 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.

What happens when you take an industry full of creative, right-brained thinkers and thrust them into the middle of a product cycle with usability problems and business goals? Well, it’s no surprise that there is a disconnect between what the other stakeholders want to do and what the designer has so carefully crafted.

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: 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.

Communicate with stakeholders, keep your sanity, and deliver the best user experience. Who should read this book When we disagree, we tend to become defensive. When we become defensive, we fail to focus on the real issues. The meeting ends, not with collaboration, but with grumbling compromise and, often, a crippled user experience.”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 😄 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 As a result, more people than ever before are interested and involved in the design of your product. What was once relegated to the “Oh, that’s nice” category of insignificance is now the center of everyone’s attention. People from all over the organization see the value of creating a great user experience and they all want to participate in the process. Marketing, executives, developers, customer service, even people in accounting will want to tell you how they think it should work. People are excited about UX because they recognize the long-term effect it has on the product, the business, and the bottom line. The good news? You’re a very popular person!