I’m reading the book Articulating Design Decisions by Tom Greever and taking notes.
Chapter 1
- Job interviews are an opportunity to practice talking about your job.
- Communicate in the language of your stakeholder, not pixels.
- What’s good design? Answer like ‘simplicity’ or ‘use of space’ confuse looks with usability. Don’t redesign without business needs or without solving problems.
- Remove subjectivity from decisions by grounding them in research. Biased or inconclusive research makes it harder.
- Dialog is sufficient for fine art critique. However, in business you need to make decisions.
- The way designs talk among themselves is different from how they would talk with a stakeholder.
- It’s hard to explain decisions based on intuition.
- Digital products impact people’s lives, that’s why everyone has an opinion.
Chapter 2
- Include stakeholders in the design process.
- We don’t see the code written by developers. However, we see UI created by designers.
- When we collaborate and disagree, we get defensive and fail to focus on real issues.
- Words are powerful (wars, changing minds).
- Good communicators win (ex. more job opportunities).
- By being articulate you can enact change when you convince someone.
- It’s not the best idea that wins – it’s the most convincing one.
- Designers who lack ability to explain their decisions may be forced making changes they disagree with.
- Articulate designer is perceived as a confident export who can be trusted with a solution.
Successful design solves problem, is easy for users and is supported by everyone.
1. Solve the problem and measure success
How will we know we’ve done our job? Opinions and subjectivity make it difficult to move forward. Pick one or two most important factors for stakeholders and measure before and after.
Practice awareness of your own decisions. This will help to explain your intuitive choices later:
- list solutions for a problem
- consider how you’d describe design over the phone
2. Make it easy
When making decisions ask yourself how does this affect the user. Validate your assumptions with user sessions.
3. Get support
Without support, the same discussions will keep repeating. If the explanation is not clear or strong enough, people will forget it. Those who are not convinced will keep suggesting other ideas, which will slow down the design work.
Consider alternatives others might suggest and why is the proposed solution better. Create simple wireframes of alternatives to have them ready to show.
Make it happen
- What problem does it solve?
- How does it affect user?
- Why is it better than alternative?
Understand your own decisions by answering these questions, then articulate them to someone else in a way that makes sense to them.
Chapter 3
Build relationships with stakeholders, understand and engage with them on personal level to make communication easier.
Create shared experiences to talk about with them – go for a lunch, drinks after work, ask for advice, or mention things you noticed about them.
Understand their perspective, feel their pain that will drive you to action out of solidarity – a true empathy!
Show the vision of a final product to executives to build trust and get approval for MVP.
Take time to know a little about their life outside of work:
- What did you do this weekend?
- How was your holiday?
- Have you seen any good movies?
- So, what’s new?
Ask them about their kids or pets.
Reveal information about yourself and ask them about it. For example: “I went camping last weekend, do you like camping?”
Understand influencers on your project: team, executives and external.
Just as we write user stories we can write a stakeholder stories. For example: “As a product owner, I want ___ so that ___ .”