Articulating Design Decisions

Product Information

Communicate with stakeholders, keep your sanity, and deliver the best user experience. Who should read this book And it’s simply impossible to have a healthy relationship with other people if that relationship is one-way." Just as often, we try to optimize the primary use case by minimizing and limiting secondary or edge cases. For example, although any user is encouraged to maintain his account profile information, it is not the main purpose of the application. This informs our decision to put account management functions in a drop-down menu rather than a large call to action. Noting these justifications can help you keep people focused on ensuring that the primary use case is always optimized even in the face of other needs and features.

In some ways, there is an arrogance that prevents us from being truly productive with people outside of our own peers. We don’t always see the other stakeholders on our project as knowing anything valuable about design. We don’t trust their instincts the way we trust our own. After all, we’re the experts. We were hired to design things because that’s what we’re good at doing. Why should managers care? Can’t they just trust us to do our jobs?So go through each of your designs, look at the agenda for the meeting, and decide the best flow for presenting your ideas. In the same way that we create a flow for our users through the application, we also want to curate the flow of our design discussion. Now match up those needs with the people in the room. For each person, ask yourself: To effectively communicate this design decision, the UX designer could present the following evidence: Get tips on hiring, onboarding, and structuring a design team with insights from DesignOps leaders. H ISTORICALLY, DESIGNERS HAVE BEEN relegated to the business of making pretty pictures. Most of us transitioned into user experience design, or as is more commonly known, UX, from other areas. But now that UX is everywhere, we are thrust into the limelight of product development with our own ideas forming a critical piece of the puzzle. It’s what we’ve always wanted! The problem? We’re not used to having to explain ourselves to other people, especially nondesigners.

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 Product Designer Edward Chechique offers practical advice in this Medium article about the importance of documenting design decisions. Articulating design decisions As mobile phone growth turned powerful smartphones into touch-screen super phones, our ability to interact with products and services on a regular basis shifted from being an intentional, arm’s-length, conscious choice to an automatic muscle-memory involuntary jerk of the wrist. Like social media, our devices are intensely personal and are becoming more intimate. Our interface with the world is no longer the machine at arm’s length. It’s the touchable glossy display that we always have with us. Always on, always connected, always shaping the way we see our world. As a result, universal understanding of the importance of UX has grown, too. Every software update introduces new ideas and elicits strong opinions from every user. This is why so many people have an opinion about your work. STARTUP CULTURE HAS CHANGED HOW PEOPLE VIEW DIGITAL PRODUCTS

Stakeholder Analysis

This book is for designers at any level that wants to learn practical tactics for articulating designs to stakeholders who may be less knowledgeable about design. Additionally, developers can benefit from learning practical tips to improve communication with designers and stakeholders. About the book Although we would like to think that we designers can create anything under the sun, the reality is that we’re limited by technology. What’s available to us will naturally force us to make design decisions that need to be explained to our stakeholders. Often, these constraints cannot be foreseen when creating the original designs, and it is only during implementation that we have to make these adjustments. Our stakeholders had certain expectations, but when it came time to make it happen, we realized that we had to make some sacrifices. You must decide what kinds of data will be most relevant to your stakeholders and optimize your designs to improve those metrics. Using data to support your decisions is very convincing, as long as you’ve got an airtight connection and are making the right assumptions. “REVEALED IN USER TESTING” Mirela argues that designers must become better communicators, using analogies and storytelling to relate with stakeholders, product managers, and developers. These people often don’t understand user experience or design thinking, so they don’t have the framework to understand the “why” behind design decisions. Using user stories