Articulating Design Decisions Book

Table Of Content

• Chapter 5: Get in the Right Mindset
• Review: Articulating Design Decisions by Tom Greever
• Design Feedback: How to give great design feedback, and how to receive it
• Download the O’Reilly App
• Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience
• Product information

The creative problem-solving approach enhances the quality of the final design and gives the design team an upper hand over their competitors. Clear and effective communication of design decisions conveys how well the designers have understood the business requirements and the effort and thought process they used to arrive at the solution. This instills a sense of confidence in clients about the designers’ capabilities and expertise, building trust and credibility. Moreover, it gives reassurance to clients that their product is in good hands and they will get the best results for their investment.

Chapter 5: Get in the Right Mindset

I had to answer their questions in a way that made sense to them, not me. I had to express to them the rationale behind a design using words that would appeal to them and meet their needs. When articulating design decisions, we always present the logic behind each decision from the user's perspective.

Review: Articulating Design Decisions by Tom Greever

If nothing else, it would be great to show someone my work and talk about design. I studied business for my undergraduate degree and quickly realized how powerful design was to bringing products to life. During college, every class project needed something designed. So, despite the fact that I wasn’t in the art department at my school, I had access to the tools (computers and software) for creating products and began my journey there, self-taught. “Articulating Design Decisions” by Tom Greever is a good read. The meat of this book is mainly focused on fundaments revolving around communication and design review meetings, sometimes missing chances where it could have gone deeper on the subject.

Design Feedback: How to give great design feedback, and how to receive it

Tom Greever on articulating design decisions – O'Reilly - O'Reilly Media

Tom Greever on articulating design decisions – O'Reilly.

Posted: Thu, 29 Sep 2016 07:00:00 GMT [source]

When decisions are well articulated by designers, clients understand the thought process behind each choice and the designers’ intent. This understanding enables them to give specific feedback. As a result, designers gain better clarity about the client's requirements and objectives of the design project.

Articulating design decisions: Designers MUST master this important soft skill

We didn’t need effective design, we needed documentation and training. If we can help users understand the system, then they will know how to use it. Our dynamic company starts each day with positivity and optimism and ends each day with the satisfaction that we are building quality products that not only we are proud of but our clients are also. Historic vegetation for the San Gabriel River was described in a joint project with the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, CSUN, and the USC Center for Sustainable Cities.

More than anything, I loved to talk with people about my work. I loved watching people look through my portfolio, comment on what they liked, or ask me questions about why I did what I did. I got a rush from telling other people about my design decisions back then; I still do today. Visual communication is a powerful tool for conveying design decisions.

I know it sounds crazy, but I really enjoy interviewing for jobs. I applied for just about anything and I said yes to every interview. It was a low-risk opportunity to practice talking about my work. Sometimes, I would go to interviews for jobs that I knew I didn’t want.

Dive in for free with a 10-day trial of the O’Reilly learning platform—then explore all the other resources our members count on to build skills and solve problems every day. People naturally think in terms of solutions rather then first identifying the problem. To often, people obsess over things that don’t really matter. You need to create an environment where everyone understands what you are doing, believes in your expertise, and supports your choice, so you can move on to the next thing. Definitely worth reading and exploiting in the future design endeavours. I’d love if all the chapters were equally digestible and rich in useful insight.

We might even set goals for the website or hire a salesperson to monitor and grow our “eBusiness,” but it was less about strong opinions and more about getting the job done. Designers make a lot of decisions based purely on intuition. In fact, our intuition is really good at solving design problems in an elegant and simple way. We’re wired to think visually, to organize elements logically for the user, and to pay careful attention to the details. I’m not exactly sure where these designers come up with definitions that sound like something straight out of a Jonathan Ive memoir. It’s the same culture that causes well-intentioned designers to create a “redesign” mockup of any popular website or app without any clue as to what that business’ needs are.

Talking to people about your designs might seem like a basic skill, but it can be difficult to do efficiently and well. And, in many cases, how you communicate about your work with stakeholders, clients, and other non-designers is more critical than the designs themselves—simply because the most articulate person usually wins. Moreover, we highlight how each design decision aligns with the business objectives of the client. We present the potential business impact of UI/UX design decisions and how they can help the client grow their product or service. By articulating the design decisions emphasizing its purpose, we showcase our intent to resonate with clients and users alike. With good communication and evidence to support our decisions, we turn challenging situations into opportune scenarios for emphasizing our expertise and building strong relationships with clients.

To complicate matters, businesses are quick to adopt buzzwords, especially those that seem to help them solve a problem they see in their organization. An executive might read an article about a successful business that has a design-centered product approach. The quote from the “user experience designer” is the tipping point. This is why UX continues to be misunderstood, even by the designers doing the work. Businesses are changing to adapt to this new reality, but none talk about UX in the same way. Now, companies are adjusting to their changing needs in a highly competitive marketplace because great design is the expected norm.

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. 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.