Articulating Design Decisions

Product Information

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: The UI/UX design process is a lengthy one, fraught with pivotal decisions at every step. Articulating design decisions acts as a means for cross-examination and validation at each step, contributing to a quality final product. Best practices for articulating design decisions Intuition and experience are also great for collaborative design exercises–bringing diverse ideas and perspectives together to find the best solution. Imitation When you’re in a meeting to get approval for your designs, staying focused is critical. It’s very easy for design discussions to go off on a tangent or be taken in an unexpected direction because of one small thing. There’s just something about design that elicits so much more clutter conversation than other disciplines. One way to keep focused is to remove anything that you think will be a distraction. A lot of people are easily distracted by things that simply don’t matter to the goal of the meeting. They can be so distracted by one thing that they’ll identify a different, unrelated problem or be unable to discuss the real issues. Consequently, part of your job is to pay attention to those things that derail the discussion and remove them from the equation altogether. Perhaps the biggest factor, though, in the explosive growth of UX as a discipline is the personalization and shrinking of the devices we use to interact with the world on a daily basis. Sitting at a computer is not a terribly personal experience. It is a separate device at arm’s length, with physical controls that one must learn to manipulate. The input methods are indirect: what I do down there with the mouse changes what I see up here on the display. And at the end of the day, I have to put my computer away and move on with my life. Something as simple as looking up the weather on a computer must be done purposefully and intentionally.

Point to the goals that we’re all trying to solve. “If our goal is to increase conversion, then changing this button color is going to negatively affect that.” As designers, we want to solve problems and achieve goals, we just need to bring that to the forefront so that people are aware of this. You can focus on motives that will appeal to the things that are important to the roles of the people at meetings. And it’s simply impossible to have a healthy relationship with other people if that relationship is one-way."To make matters worse, we may be the only people in the room without a specific, articulated justification for our choices. Developers make choices based on what’s possible or how to maximize their time and code. Executives want to do what is going to make the company the most money, and so they propose things that they think will accomplish that. Marketing wants you to make changes so that everything is consistent and on-brand. But, unless you’re prepared to defend your decisions intelligently, the only thing you can say is that you disagree. That degree of subjectivity has to change. A Shift Toward Products Finally, I really appreciate attention to language, to wording. That's where a subtle difference can have significant impact. It was great to have longish examples/scripts of conversations. And the ability to deal with this fact is what makes us better designers! Constraints is one of the reasons that the world needs a designer: because other people couldn’t figure out how to make everything work because of them. 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.” Product Designer Edward Chechique offers practical advice in this Medium article about the importance of documenting design decisions. Articulating design decisions

Although every project is different and every client has unique needs, I’ve found that there are some ways of explaining design decisions that I seem to use over and over again. I often say the same kinds of things to defend my projects and I’ve compiled them here for reference. Some of them are similar or related to one another, but they should give you a good basis for the kinds of responses that are effective in design discussions.To take it a step further, we don’t have to look far to see how digital products have fueled uprisings and revolutions in places such as Syria, Turkey, Egypt, and even Ferguson, Missouri in the United States. In these situations, the use of digital products became the voice of the people and upset the political balance. An interface designed by someone in a meeting with stakeholders became a tool for empowering an entire population toward revolution. This is why so many people have an opinion about your work. PERSONAL DEVICES HAVE CHANGED HOW PEOPLE VIEW DIGITAL PRODUCTS

Them: “I don’t like the color of this button” You: “So what I hear you’re saying is that if someone wants to schedule a meeting, they may have a tough time based on the design of that button. Am I hearing you correctly?” You’re confirming that you hear them and are willing to do something about it. UX has come a long way in this regard. People understand that our decisions need to be founded in some sort of explainable logic. We are much better at using research to support our ideas so that we remove some of the subjectivity from the equation. That’s a good shift, but even research can be biased, unintentionally flawed, or otherwise inconclusive. This adds complexity to the challenge of talking about design and UX. Businesses Don’t Critique One of these requirements was to explain the fees and interest in an extremely detailed way and with a lot of complicated information that made it difficult for the user to understand. A/B testing: helps designers choose the best decision between two options. A/B testing works best when designers want to test subtle differences, like color choice, headlines, and CTAs.

Design Meetings Template

We used green because green means go or success, and the contrast will draw the user’s eyes to that element.” 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

What seems like a fuzzy, soft skill might actually be more of a recipe: personality + role / values + observed reactions = predictable behavior! As I said earlier, as designers we need to understand that sometimes we will have to give in and allow our stakeholders to make changes to the product.

It’s usually enough to simply state with confidence what the data shows without the need for further discussion: 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.