Articulating Design Decisions

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.
  • They 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. 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).