Articulating Design Decisions Quotes

“Don’t start any sentence with “From a design perspective...” because that’s usually just another way of saying “from my perspective.” Remember, we don’t care about your perspective; we care about the user’s perspective.”
― Tom Greever, Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience

“We aren’t doing user experience design if we haven’t actually seen a user experience it.”
― Tom Greever, Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience

“That’s where we find ourselves today. In a meeting with people who have no idea how to do our jobs, yet consistently find it their place to tell us how to do it. It’s enough to drive any designer insane.”
― Tom Greever, Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience

“designers come up with definitions that sound like something straight out of a Jonathan Ive memoir. I”
― Tom Greever, Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience

“It motivates us to care so much about the challenges of another person that we’re driven to action. Empathy is the ultimate form of understanding.”
― Tom Greever, Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience

“When it comes to design, notes are critical because opinions and ideas about the right decision will change over time. If you don’t have notes, you don’t have a paper trail to understand what logic went into the original decisions. You only have “he said, she said” and a bunch of rehashed conversations. When design decisions are made verbally in a meeting, it can be nearly impossible to remember later why decisions were made.”
― Tom Greever, Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience

“So go through each of your designs, look at the agenda for the meeting, and decide the best flow for presenting your ideas. In the same way that we create a flow for our users through the application, we also want to curate the flow of our design discussion. Now match up those needs with the people in the room. For each person, ask yourself: • What do they care about the most? • What are their personal goals for this design? • What do I already know they want or don’t want?”
― Tom Greever, Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience

“Find out what the most important factors are for your stakeholders—impressions, conversion, account sign-ups—and then pick one or two measurable issues that you’d like to improve and write them down.”
― Tom Greever, Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience

“Words: so innocent and powerless as they are standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE”
― Tom Greever, Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience

“Practicing for a meeting is the usability test of being articulate: you get to run through everything and make sure it all works as expected.”
― Tom Greever, Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience