Process: Communicating Design

Let’s imagine this scenario: A product team has gathered for a design review and the UX design lead on the team enthusiastically proclaims, “We need to make the user interface easier to use and more engaging!” Heads nod around the table. The product manager thinks in terms of simplifying the feature set, while from the visual designer’s perspective, this could mean adding modern visuals that are inspired by Framer templates. A developer might think about optimizing performance. Everyone leaves the meeting confident that they’re on the same page, only to discover weeks later that they’ve all conceived of different solutions, resulting in a product hodgepodge that misses the mark entirely.

Such misalignment happens far too often on product teams—more because of misalignment in understanding rather than because of over- or undercommunicating. We toss around fuzzy UX terms and grand design adjectives, assuming that everyone shares a common understanding. And they might to a certain extent. However, in reality, vague communication is the perfect breeding ground for misunderstanding. As George Bernard Shaw famously quipped, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” UX and product design professionals are quite familiar with this illusion. We might think we’ve clearly communicated our vision while each teammate has heard something different. Thus, in the everyday hustle of product development, vague language can undermine both team alignment and project success. Read More

My last column, “Specifying Behavior,” focused on the importance of interaction designers’ taking full responsibility for designing and clearly communicating the behavior of product user interfaces. At the conclusion of the Design Phase for a product release, interaction designers’ provide key design deliverables that play a crucial role in ensuring their solutions to design problems actually get built. These deliverables might take the form of high-fidelity, interactive prototypes; detailed storyboards that show every state of a user interface in sequence; detailed, comprehensive interaction design specifications; or some combination of these. Whatever form they take, producing these interaction design deliverables is a fundamental part of a successful product design process.

In this installment of On Good Behavior, I’ll provide an overview of a product design process, then discuss some indispensable activities that are part of an effective design process, with a particular focus on those activities that are essential for good interaction design. Although this column focuses primarily on activities that are typically the responsibility of interaction designers, this discussion of the product design process applies to all aspects of UX design. Read More

This is a sample chapter from the book Articulating Design Decisions, by Tom Greever, which O’Reilly Media published in October 2015. UXmatters is republishing this chapter with Tom Greever’s permission. Copyright © 2015 Tom Greever. All rights reserved.

Chapter 4: Reducing Cognitive Load

“Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.”
—Alexander Graham Bell

When it comes to usability, getting users to successfully complete a task is all about their available brain space: their cognitive load. The more clutter, options, or roadblocks we put in front of them, the more we fill their head and make it difficult for them to complete a task. The same is true when it comes to the task of meeting with stakeholders. Our goal should be to remove as much of the clutter, options, and roadblocks as possible so that our stakeholders’ brains are freed to focus on the primary task of the meeting: getting approval for our designs. If they are distracted by an incoherent outline, grumpy coworkers, or a derailed conversation that has nothing to do with the project, it will be much more difficult for us to complete that task. Our goal is not to just have a meeting, but to make the meeting productive, valuable, and successful. Read More