Andrew Travers | Byekick

Journal

Communicating UX

In May, I spoke at the excellent UX Lisbon on Communicating UX – a talk about how we design, how we collaborate effectively and how we learn to share a common design language. This is a transcript of what I had to say.

This talk is about ideas, and how we talk about them.

‘Designers sell their work. Designers get up in front of people and explain why they’ve made the decisions they’ve made. And if you can’t do that, you can’t call yourself a designer.’
Mike Monteiro
5by5.tv/pipeline/43

What Mike Monteiro had to say recently to designers, has particular resonance, I think, for UX designers. Working at a strategic and conceptual level, our ability to communicate our ideas is especially important. So, I’m want to share with you some thoughts on what we say, and how we say it.

I’d like to start by sharing a story with you.

It comes from a few years ago, where I was part of a project team, heading on an early morning train to a client’s offices to present a design concept. In between the coffee and the croissants, we’d all agreed about the need to ‘tell a story’, to share what we’d found, the problems we’d identified, and how we were going to go about tackling them.

And then, off the train, and into the meeting, our lead designer opened his Mac, fired up Photoshop and said:

‘So here’s the home page’

Well, you can probably guess what came next. They ate him alive. A brutal hour of merciless critique, picking apart every aspect of the design from structure, to typography; from colour, to why the funny text was in Latin.

So, why had he done it?

There is – I think – a terrible temptation for us, in the manner of a modern-day Don Draper, to want to open the red curtain and reveal our creations with a little panache. Hoping for that moment where the client reels back, astonished by our genius, our insight, our ‘artistry’.

Perhaps we’re just launching into the answer before we’ve remembered to share what the question was in the first place.

And, of course, we’re not artists, we’re designers and we’re here to solve problems. And if we can’t define or describe the problem we’re solving, we can’t expect our clients -or, for that matter, our fellow developers and designers -to see our work in its true context, to provide us with the critique we need, and to work with us to find good solutions together. I say ‘together’, and I mean together.

‘If we believe design is such a valuable lens to view the world through and a fantastic mental mode for problem solving, we should open it up to everyone. Not doing so is double-speak.’
Frank Chimero
Designers Poison

This comes from Frank Chimero’s review of AIGA’s recent One Day For Design round table on Twitter. The point is this: if we know how great, how powerful design can be, don’t we have a duty to involve others?

I’d argue that this is at least as true for user experience designers as it is for any other designer. Because we’re still at that step remove from the design execution of a user interface, we’ve a yet harder role to play in explaining not just what has informed our work -the research, the design principles -but also what our work will inform: where it begins and where it ends. Connecting the dots between UX, design, and development and how, together they evolve.

Before working with creative agencies, I used to sit on the other side of the table as a client. And my theory -and my experience -is that clients often have a fear lurking at the back of their minds when they work with designers. And that fear goes something like this:

And the way I think we best counter this fear is by being humble and by being open. And I don’t mean using humility as a tactic to disarm and flatter, but as the fundamental underpinning to how we approach our work.

Sounds easy, but when we’re very often the most expensive person at the table, it’s easier said than done. It can take confidence and guts.
Whether we’re starting from an expert evaluation, field research, analytics, or stakeholder interviews, it’s really important we ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’ what we understand the design problem to be. And that we don’t take sole ownership of what that problem is, but share our understanding of it.

Sometimes we can do this best by just getting out of the way, and putting the client and user closer in touch with one another.

Here’s how Leisa Reichelt did this, on a project we worried on together last year for an charity called ‘StartHere’. StartHere is a charity that helps the most vulnerable in society -those with the poorest literary skills, and incredibly difficult personal circumstances -get access to information they need, when they need it.

‘D. is 19 and is currently homeless and has been since his care home ‘refused care’ of him. He sleeps on friends’ sofas but manages to attend college. He’s had problems with drug use in the past and has been in prison for shop lifting and assault. He is bi-polar which affects his confidence very much. He avoids social networking sites as in the past his peers have been abusive towards him.’

Leisa presented a series of slides like this one in near-silence – letting the experience of our interviewees come through directly to those in the room. And it was all the more powerful -and moving – for Leisa having that confidence to resist the temptation to translate and interpret, and instead let them get closer to the difficult and complex lives of their users all by themselves.

The stories that we tell in our work help put the focus where it should be. Not on us, but on the end user.

How we tell these stories matters, too. A shared, common language matters -respecting both the language and conventions of the client’s business, and bridging the gap between the client’s world and ours.
Two years ago at EuroIA, Scott Thomas – the design director for Barack Obama’s extraordinary presidential campaign – talked about the limitations of wireframes and their disconnect with the language of the political campaign staff he was working alongside. So, for the Obama site, he split the strategic wireframes from the functional -those that contained the component building blocks of a set of pages, and the purpose or story they were there to tell.

In other words, he explained their rationale not in the arcane language of the information architect, but in the argot of the politician: making it easier for his campaign staff to engage; easier to imagine how this would translate in execution and with their messaging; and where and how they could best contribute.

When we’re building our argument, rather than presenting a fait accompli, we need to show our working. To take our client on the journey with that we ourselves embarked upon: where we started, how our thinking evolved, the ideas we tried and discounted.

I’d argue that we should spend almost as much time showing what didn’t work as much as what did. Because it’s in collectively understanding what didn’t work, that we inform our understanding of what might, and that we counter the ‘fear’ I mentioned earlier of the imposed design, the impossible notion of the single ‘right’ solution. It’s in this sharing of our thinking, that we let clients in, where we turn from being the anointed expert -in heavy quotation marks -to collaborating directly with a group of people to reach a shared conclusion.

This isn’t, I think, about just language and style, but method and mindset about how we see our role in relation to our colleagues and our clients, and in amplifying the voice of the user.

That isn’t about just involving them at the research stage, but sketching and analysing together, removing the client/agency barrier wherever its possible to do so.

So, a word on what our end point of that might look like. In a piece for Johnny Holland, Jared Spool talked about the danger of expert-led recommendations.

‘Making recommendations is the easy way out, so it feels like the best path. But, in the long run, it’s a trap. The house odds are against you and eventually, it will all come crumbling down.’
Jared Spool
My Recommendation: Stop Making Design Recommendations

Rather than ‘making recommendations’, he argues that what the best UX teams do, is to ‘suggest experimentation’, a more collaborative, exploratory, agile approach.

And – for me – that’s it right there. That’s the point we stop being the mythical designer-as-artist, the Don Draper and become the more mature, trusted, designer-as-consultant.

It seems to me that it’s worth sacrificing a just little bit of short-term ‘wow’ for longer-term understanding – and increasing the chances of our work not just being realised in the first place, but sustained long after we’ve concluded our engagement.

Five points to wrap up.

1. Share, not tell
Our role is, in part, to reconnect clients with their audience, not to prove how clever we are -or insert ourselves in between client and user. Don’t get in the way, it’s not about us.

2. Don’t be a ‘rockstar’. Rockstars are wankers.
The more fully we involve the people we’re working with -designers, developers, clients -the better informed and more robust our approach is likely to be. We need to share what we learn as designers, to act as a guide and facilitator. However ‘expert’ we might be, the best solutions come with the active contribution of others.

3. Mind your language
We need to connect our work to not just the priorities, but the language of our clients too. We shouldn’t leave it to them to join the dots between our theory and their practice.

4. Show your working
By removing the mystique and barriers to understanding our work, the more we allow the client to be a fuller, more engaged part of the design process with us -and to understand: our role and why we are proposing what we are proposing.

From preparatory sketches to discarded ideas -we deepen our client’s appreciation of our thinking. Our openness gives permission for them to be open too. And it opens the way to the kind of informed critique that we should all want from our clients

5. Be Spool, not Draper
Suggest and collaborate rather than make recommendations. That’s got to be a richer experience for our clients, but for us too.

By moving from ‘conveyancing’ to ‘collaboration’, we share together, we learn together, we make things better, together.

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