Articulating Design Decisions

Product Information

Practicing for a meeting is the usability test of being articulate: you get to run through everything and make sure it all works as expected.

What seems like a fuzzy, soft skill might actually be more of a recipe: personality + role / values + observed reactions = predictable behavior! While people may be able to recognize good design, without the structure for communicating design intent, good design solutions could become mired in design by committee, scope creep, or any of the many other detrimental things that can prevent good design from being realized. During one especially disastrous meeting when we were reviewing a brand-new home page and navigation, we got nowhere. My wireframes were a little messy because, well, they’re just wireframes: quick and dirty, just enough to communicate the intent, right? Because you’ve already identified that your decisions are tied to that case, remember to do a quick gut check to confirm that you haven’t lost sight of it in the process of moving things around.These ideas can be incredibly subjective and difficult to justify to the average person, but often it is simple enough to explain that the combination of elements they see on the screen is meant to move the user from point A to point B. People are sometimes invited to meetings because they have a unique perspective on our product, even if they aren’t directly involved.

Even after you help them understand that those things are temporary or off-topic, I find that they still keep coming around to it again and again. Make a list, and read and reread that list over and over until you’re fully prepared with your best guess about how people will react to your designs. Make sure that you build into other people and relationships enough that you already have these go-to people available.The purpose of getting people to back you up is to build a case to demonstrate that other people agree with you. If we always knew with certainty what would definitely accomplish our goals, we wouldn’t need to even meet. On the one hand, they’re apt to agree with you because they understand the realities of the resourcing situation. 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.

However, your team cannot be your only source of support because everyone in the room knows that you share the same perspective. Intuition and experience In each case, we’re trying to demonstrate that the standards put in place for applications have a natural benefit to our development process as well as the portability and accessibility of the application in the long term.All of the previously agreed upon design work we had done to create a consistent, meaningful hierarchy for the app was on the chopping block! The design system’s style guide, design language, and other guidelines reduce decision-making so designers can focus on solving user needs. So go through each of your designs, look at the agenda for the meeting, and decide the best flow for presenting your ideas.