Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience

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Starting with why" means that you begin any project or decision by questioning its purpose, its reason for being. Much of the content is the same, but the activities and level of interaction is limited by the online format. Greever also goes over ways in which to optimize your meeting for retention including primacy and recency (people remember the first and last thing you say to them), surprise, and plain old repetition.

As someone who worked for a very meeting-focused company, I can say there are few that are successful. To effectively articulate design decisions, it's important to be able to explain how your design choices align with the overall goals and strategy of the organization.

When lead designers communicate this effectively, they steer the design team in the right direction. When communicating your design choices, it is important to articulate their reasoning and explain why you believe they are the best solution.

The root of this book focuses on how important communication is when working in the design field and how best to communicate with various stakeholders about your designs. Rarely however do I consider all three of these simultaneously when making a design decision or mapping out a potential solution. It is important to listen to your stakeholders in these meetings to establish trust and to actually hear them out. For example “Yes I understand what you’re saying”, “Yes there are definitely ways we could improve this” or “Yes I agree we need to solve this problem”.As I read this I thought back to all the times I’d been stubborn as I persisted towards a goal that was no longer relevant. The creative problem-solving approach enhances the quality of the final design and gives the design team an upper hand over their competitors.

As such we understand the challenges in getting everyone on the same page and the need for articulating design decisions well. By documenting the design decisions and the reasoning behind them, designers can create a reference point for the future.O’Reilly members get unlimited access to books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers. Well-documented design decisions act as a record of information that the design team can leverage for similar projects in the future.