Articulating Design Decisions | Bootcamp

This is an article about how I was able to articulate my decisions during my design project.

First of all, this is part of my design process. So don't expect that it will fix every single problem in your life, because it don't. But, by reading other cases, we managed to evolve and open our minds to other types of solutions, becoming increasingly complete and diversified professionals.

Also, this article was based on a chapter on the book called Articulating Design Decisions. The chapter's name is "Dealing with changes".

There's some advices:

When you see this emoji 💡, it means that I'm sharing something about my cases, my top tips!
When you see a phrase in quotation marks highlighted, it means that it is an excerpt taken from the book.

Ok, so let's go!

I had to accept that there is something about design that causes people to have subjective opinions. So, during the critiques or design review, we are expressing our desire for the stakeholders to give us feedback. But as we do this, we need to think about how we will conduct these conversations to best lead changes.

The changes are proof that your design is evolving

No matter how hard we try, we still have to make changes we disagree with in our designs.

"Stakeholders will spend a disproportionate amount of time on issues that are not critical to the project."

And that's ok! This happens because people spend more time focusing on a small problem because it is more easily visible and accessible to everyone. So, lead the conversation for people to bring up points that evolve the discussion and drive progress for your design team.

One thing that helped me a lot to do this was to bring the project as closely as possible with all partner areas: design system, content design, business and technology. So when my project was presented in the discussions, we could talk about what we could evolve from what we have today.

I was able to do this because I realized that I needed to plan better discussions.

"We must identify conversational patterns where it is necessary to employ methods to keep our focus on task."

💡 Top tip:

Give people the context on which kind of feedback you need, and make sure you do it before inviting them. I've attached an image below to give an idea about the type of critique or review we would get:

Figjam's framework. You can find it typing "Design Critique"

You have to understand what is REALLY going on

Here’s one of the paradoxes of being a designer:

"We want to make changes to evolve our design, but being asked to make changes we disagree with is exactly what we’re trying to avoid."

We try our best to listen and understand everyone’s side in order to appeal to people’s needs in our response. So, if stakeholders still disagrees with you, there are a few reasons why this is happening:

There is a misunderstanding: it is possible that you and your stakeholders are not synchronized.
Your designs are not the best solution: it is hard to accept but it is possible that our design is not the best option. We need to remember that our stakeholders and leaders were placed in positions of authority for a reason and they are often ultimately responsible for our successes and failures.
Stakeholders have a need that is not being met: some people — particularly executives — simply want to know that the item that is important to them is there. As long as they know where the functionality they want is, this kind of stakeholder will generally be satisfied.
The stakeholders are not reasonable at all: is it possible that your stakeholders are unreasonable? Yes! But most of the time this is not what happens. In any case, we cannot also disregard the possibility that these people are used to doing everything their own way.
People want to know they are being heard: just as simple it is.

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade

For me, this is the best of the best parts of being a designer: it’s knowing that I have the skills to turn bad feedback into amazing design.

"Instead of fighting a bad idea or one that is difficult to improve, we usually give up. We usually shrug our shoulders and add what the person wants, exactly as proposed."

Yes, you don't have to lie to me, everyone already did this sometime before! But let’s face the main fact of this topic: every design has limitations.

And the ability to deal with this fact is what makes us better designers! Constraints is one of the reasons that the world needs a designer: because other people couldn’t figure out how to make everything work because of them.

So if we need to implement a design decision that we disagree with, it’s important not to give up and just throw it into the interface — however tempting that might be. Proposing to implement this type of decision can easily be a possibility for you to discover the best way to implement something and evolve the design materials that your team has today.

💡 Top tip:

To make it clearer, I’ll exemplify a situation I faced:

Because I deal with the financial world, my product has a series of legal requirements and not all of them I agreed to have.

One of these requirements was to explain the fees and interest in an extremely detailed way and with a lot of complicated information that made it difficult for the user to understand.

Despite being something I didn’t agree to have, I was willing to create it in the best way and managed to arrive at the best solution, which ended up serving as an example for the other types of loan products that the company has.

"It is also important to remember that sometimes when a stakeholder is very insistent on a specific change you can start to evolve the design in a way that is inconsistent with the problem."

You need to find out what the problem is first.

💡 Top tip:

Again, to exemplify, I will use a moment I faced:

The main focus of our project was to make the product bring profit to the company.
The customer journey flow had some experience improvement needs and one of the requirements was that we simplify.

Over the course of the project, I came up with an extremely innovative way of simplifying that had not been tested before. In parallel, there was already a product tested, approved by the user and that was already making a profit.

If I had paid attention to this last detail, we would have saved some creation time, providing a few weeks to test the new and innovative flow.

And finally, you need to create an environment of trust

Our day to day with our stakeholders is part of a relationship.

"And it’s simply impossible to have a healthy relationship with other people if that relationship is one-way."

As I said earlier, as designers we need to understand that sometimes we will have to give in and allow our stakeholders to make changes to the product.

The author talks about “an bank account of trust” that you will use with them:

When you need to give in, we will consider it as a bank deposit;
When you need to insist on something, we will consider it as a withdrawal.

This facilitates the balance of relationships on a daily basis, allowing everyone to listen to and respect each other.

Also, it’s important to remember that you can be wrong.

"While being wrong might give the impression that the bonds of trust will be broken, it’s actually an opportunity to raise the level of trust if you admit that you made a mistake."

Unlike the traditional world of justice, where the defendant confesses to the error and must be punished for it, the world of design is different.

We need to confess the mistake with the humility we have and speak openly about it, letting people know that when you have a problem in the project, you will say it as soon as possible so that the improvement is made as soon as possible.

Fail fast learn faster.

Those are the top tips on how I articulate design decisions, but there are lots of other best practices you might need!

I strongly recommend that you read the book so that you constantly evolve your mindset in relation to your projects.

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