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. One example is designing for accessibility. When you’re building an accessible application, it will inform decisions about the kinds of controls you choose and how those interactions are implemented in the design. We usually begin with a no-limits design that, as soon as implementation is underway, gets whittled down into what’s actually possible, given our desire to make the app work for everyone. Even though nearly anything is technically possible, it might not always be recommended (or it might take too much time to accomplish), and so we must adjust our expectations to account for these needs. 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. The stakeholders are not reasonable at all: is it possible that your stakeholders are unreasonable? Yes! But most of the time this is not what happens. In any case, we cannot also disregard the possibility that these people are used to doing everything their own way.

Heatmaps: inform design teams how users interact with user interfaces and content. For example, do most users use the primary CTA or look for another option in the navigation menu? Full Book Name: Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience 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. 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.Schools are responding to the changing demand for designers by offering courses in information architecture, interface design, and usability testing techniques, and rightly so. But, the majority of people working in UX today didn’t come from a school that specialized in the field nor did we take a class to teach us a user-centered approach. We migrated into UX from other areas within the company: marketing, IT, design, research. Even human behaviorists and psychologists are finding their relevance in the explosive field called UX. IT’S A NEW ROLE

For more tips on articulating design decisions, you can listen to the full podcast episode here on iTunes or here on Soundcloud 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 Merge components include properties and interactivity defined by the design system, so designers can spend more time building user interfaces to solve user problems rather than making component-level decisions.One of the best ways to make a case for your designs is to directly connect it to the needs of the business. Here are three of the most common responses for appealing to the business: It can be difficult to know with certainty how a particular design will affect your goals, especially for smaller interactions that might not affect the overall use of the entire application. The point here is not to know with certainty. If we always knew with certainty what would definitely accomplish our goals, we wouldn’t need to even meet. You need to have confidence that your experience leads you to believe with all reasonable certainty that this design is at least one step of a larger approach that will take you where you need to go. As with agendas, the degree to which you need to practice will vary depending on the importance of the meeting. A big presentation with the CEO should be practiced a lot. A daily meeting with your boss will require less, but it’s still a good idea if there are issues that might be difficult to discuss or if you’re unsure how you might say it. For a big meeting, I might book the meeting room the day before so that I can practice in the same environment as much as I need to. For a simple phone call with my boss, I might stand at my desk and talk through the agenda once or twice to build my confidence. You have to decide how much practice is necessary to ensure you have the mental capacity to be articulate in the moment. A friend of mine who is actually in the UX field recommended this book to me. I have an interest in UX, but am in the accounting field myself.

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.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. You’re wrong,” she said. “None of that really matters. The most important thing you could ask me...the very first thing you should always ask is, ‘What are we trying to communicate?’” Our entire culture has shifted its thinking about design, specifically the design of interfaces, devices, services, and products. Everyone has a personal device now, and they are only getting more personal. The Internet of Things will continue to push UX into (and onto) our faces at every turn. Everyone has apps they use, love, and hate. The people in your meetings are probably participating in another user experience while at the same time reviewing and considering your own. It’s no wonder that everyone everywhere at every level of the organization is intensely interested in and has an opinion about the UX that you are trying to create. How are you going to deal with it? 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. 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!