Articulating Design Decisions

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You need to have confidence that your experience leads you to believe with all reasonable certainty that this design is at least one step of a larger approach that will take you where you need to go. This is a sample chapter from the book Articulating Design Decisions, by Tom Greever, which O’Reilly Media published in October 2015. This may not even be a budget problem, but one of hiring: we can’t hire the right kinds of talent or we can’t hire fast enough.

Get a set of business-sized reference cards with a brief overview of the important principles in the book.In design meetings, we want to be certain that there are other people who are prepared to ask good questions, point out specific important elements, or otherwise support our proposed designs. The stakeholders asked you to make some changes—despite your best efforts at convincing them otherwise—and now you must show them that design. Still, it’s an effective way to demonstrate that you’re interacting with users and improving your designs to accommodate what you’ve learned. The ringer might be the anchor who asks a good question of a reporter that he didn’t cover in the initial story. Storing the agenda in an accessible place is important for everyone else on the team—as we will see in the next chapter—but a paper agenda gives you a physical base you can quickly refer to.

Even though it’s not usually an explicit part of the UX process, some organizations don’t have standards that include styles for elements such as buttons, drop-down lists, and checkboxes.It can be risky to choose a pattern that doesn’t have a track record, but purposefully choosing a pattern because it is widely understood in the market is a great way to build a case for your decisions. We used green because green means go or success, and the contrast will draw the user’s eyes to that element. Some people are really distracted by any use of color, so it’s better to avoid color as much as possible.