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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tom Greever
Read between
February 9 - February 23, 2022
better communication yielded better design.
The most important thing you could ask me…the very first thing you should always ask is, ‘What are we trying to communicate?’”
To her, the project was about communication. To me, it was only about pixels.
A lot of people working in UX today didn’t come from a school that specializes in the field nor did we take a class to teach us a user-centered approach. We migrated into UX from other areas within the company: marketing, IT, graphic design, research.
Whatever your path, a lot of us UXers have similar stories. Most of us didn’t start out in UX, because UX didn’t exist.
The goal is to remain flexible and able to adapt quickly to different situations.
articulating design decisions is about creating an environment in which stakeholders can clearly see the expertise and thought process of the designers so that they want to support them.
It’s about creating trust, demonstrating effectiveness, and doing so in a way that’s compelling and convincing.
just communicating design ideas to one person. The amount of time the other designers spent actually creating the mockups was trivial compared to the time and energy that went into finding the best way of communicating them.
Communicating about the designs was more important than the designs themselves.
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’s needs are.
Everyone knows good design when they see it, even if they don’t know how to create it.
When we disagree, we tend to become defensive. When we become defensive, we fail to focus on the real issues.
The home page syndrome is a condition whereby the home screen of an application or website becomes a catchall for everything, creating a garage sale of links, buttons, and banner ads that unravels the fabric of usability, causing designers to cry themselves to sleep.
We must understand the fundamentals of what makes a great experience so that we can reproduce that thinking and approach.
a design is really only good when it solves a problem.
every design needs to be successful: It solves a problem. It’s easy for users. It’s supported by everyone.
Projects without goals will surely languish because there is no way to convince someone else that you’re right if you have nothing by which to measure its success.
The best way is to write them down. There is something about moving your unconscious thought to a more tangible form that allows you to remember everything you’ve done.
Do whatever it takes to document your own thought process.
The purpose of this exercise is to help you uncover your thought process and articulate your decisions first to yourself.
Whatever works for you, the goal here is to find a way to turn your thought process into something real, shareable, and visible, to uncover the words that will help you to explain yourself to other people in a way that makes sense.
Obviously, if we’re taking a user-centered design approach, we have to create something that is easy for users.
So make your best guess with the data you have, but then verify your designs with real people and make notes.
agreement to move forward, not agreement on the solution. Forward momentum is the goal, not consensus.
So much of life and work is built around relationships. It’s not just who you know; it’s the quality of those relationships, too.
What’s ironic to me is that UXers are so good at putting the user first, at garnering empathy for and attempting to see the interface from the perspective of the user. Yet, we often fail to do the same thing for the people who hold the keys to our success.
Communication is easier in good relationships.
if we can help them be successful, that will help us be successful as a byproduct.
People are busy (or at least they think they are).
More than that, their attitudes and responses to your work might have more to do with the things happening outside of your conversation than what you’re showing them.
Despite the fact that we spend so much time together during working hours, all of these people’s most important relationships are somewhere else.
we can take the time to realize that the way they respond to our ideas and work might have (or probably has) nothing to do with us at all.
there are always other things going on in the room that you will never know about.
show both what’s possible in the short term and what’s preferred for the future. This approach creates a buzz that keeps everyone excited and makes it more likely that they’ll support you.
He’s a great conversationalist not because he’s good at talking, but because he’s good at asking questions.
Again, the point of asking questions is to get the other person to talk to you about what’s important to them.
