You can’t be a good designer if you can’t tell a good story. Designers should be great storytellers, designing products to be as simple and efficient as possible so that people can quickly understand them in seconds, just like telling a story.
Communication is an irreplaceable basic need in our social life. We begin to communicate when we are babies: our parents communicate with us, saying things that we could not understand at the time. Parents never wonder why they do that, but now you’re wondering: why do people talk to a baby like that?
Anne Fernald, a developmental psychologist at Stanford University, believes that chatting with infants can help them grasp the rules and rhythms of language at an early age, while laying the groundwork for them to understand how the world works . We organize our lives through storytelling, and communication is an important foundation.
Without stories and conversations, communication breaks down. Each sentence constitutes a base level, like a wall made of bricks connected to each other. Communication is based on the consensus of each participant.
Communication is critical for designers: because they are the ones who bring products to life through communication.
Whether a designer can communicate effectively about his design determines whether his product is good enough. They will identify the most important problems from the beginning and then present solutions through the product. Some designers are persistent in finding better solutions to the problems around them, and they will continue to speak up for social issues, whether those issues cover the company’s vision or their own.
A small prologue or a “before…” moment will start the designer’s journey of quest. When they finally find a solution to a problem, they describe it and give it some meaning. This is the storytelling process.
Steve Jobs said, “The most powerful people in the world are storytellers. They set the vision, values and agenda for an entire generation to come.”
When setting a long-term vision, values, and agenda for their products, designers should learn to be what Jobs called great storytellers. Designers have to start with the “how to” process and follow through until the problem is resolved. Design your product to be as simple and efficient as possible so that people can quickly understand it in seconds. As Chritophe Niemann said, the power of language is that you can express a very complex concept in a simple, efficient form .
Always start from design thinking
One of the collaborative issues we often encounter in the context of user experience is how we can work together to build a valuable, compelling product. Clients should know our motives when they see our work; on the other hand, our work also needs to meet the expectations of key decision makers.
It’s not as simple as it sounds.
During my five months as an interaction/visual intern at Blibli.con, I learned a lot of things I couldn’t imagine before: like meeting with key decision makers and “fighting” with them about the product. I never imagined I would face so many challenges in communicating product ideas to key decision makers. Along the way, I have often asked myself: How can I create value when describing the story behind the product? How can you be more convincing when communicating with key decision makers?
By far the best fundamental way of thinking (that I’ve found) is Design Thinking. (Side note: don’t forget your starting point 🙂
“I always meet people who go straight to the solution and don’t question assumptions – engineers, businessmen, yes, designers (and design students). These people make me think twice. I’ve observed Design students who don’t have ideas and just get things done, they don’t have creativity, they don’t have imagination, they don’t have a spirit of skepticism. That’s totally against the idea of design thinking. So I changed my mind: Design thinking really matters .” Don Norman, an authority on user experience academia, said in “Rethinking Design Thinking”.
In short, as defined by the Interaction Design Foundation (IDF), design thinking is an approach to exploring user needs based on the purpose of providing a solution. There are five steps in this process: generating resonance, defining the problem, formulating a hypothesis, prototyping, and testing. Like sharpening a pencil, the whole process repeats itself over and over: as you keep sharpening, you get a good plan.
It’s good to consciously solve problems in an easy way, but with design thinking, designers are better able to expand their thinking through the above five steps, until they finally come up with several alternative application solutions. In particular, design thinking focuses on two cores: generating empathy and aiming to solve user problems.
Understand the mechanics of communication
For this problem, let’s use the “design thinking” way of thinking. First, I introduce the concept of “communication” and use design thinking to analyze the problem based on my experience:
1. Communicating design ideas means empathy
It’s not the point of what’s right and what’s wrong; the key is to understand the other person’s perception.
When backed by strong facts and figures, it’s easy for me to clash with others, as I do when I have to deal with key decision makers who stand by my own ideas. When we look back at the original goal, we will find that our starting point is for the user, and the same is true for the stakeholders. We have to have a global awareness, learn to position ourselves, and at the same time remain objective.
Empathy is fundamental when understanding user scenarios; we also need to bring empathy when demonstrating the product to be delivered. The more empathetic you are, the better you can understand what user value means.
To know if you’re a good designer, think back to how you communicate without empathy: because sometimes, as designers who seem to understand what users want, we can be wrong of.
2. Anticipation
It can be frustrating when we think about the gap between our expectations and the status quo of the product. It just so happens that I’m still a perfectionist (“improving”), and if a key decision maker says, “This doesn’t seem right”, I usually ask them what needs to be changed and how to improve it.
It’s not just about getting feedback, it’s about getting a better understanding of their expectations. When we receive feedback from key decision makers or partners, we don’t take it for granted, because sometimes they make unreasonable demands (you know). So after getting feedback, the best way to communicate is to define – what are their problems, what are their demands, what are your views – and then offer whatever you can think of that is fair to both of you And sensible solution. In order to get a win-win solution, I strongly recommend that you always align yourself with the expectations of key decision makers.
3. Assumptions
We live by making assumptions; assumptions are how we make our evaluations. Based on this assumption above, we treat others as others treat us, and vice versa. However, sometimes we don’t realize that these assumptions are silly and blind the truth.
Source: Evervowel.com
I’m sure most of you have seen this picture, and in fact we do things like this unconsciously. Sometimes our assumptions convince us that we can only learn from what we see and feel. On this level, however, many principled people are too “powerful” to realize that they are being limited by their own assumptions.
We make assumptions and are convinced that we are right; then we defend our assumptions and try to prove others wrong.
– Don Miguel Ruiz
After ” making assumptions ” as said in design thinking : challenging assumptions. Ask yourself why you think this way, and test whether your assumptions are correct: is this a fact, or is it just a personal feeling? Try changing your assumptions: understand, discard, and re-understand. This helps (works for me) to get innovative solutions. Of course, empathy is also very important in this process.
4. Be confident about your product
The product ideas we communicate to key decision makers must be consistent with the product solutions we provide according to user demands. Remember: you are the designer. You have the right to take the product on the right development path like a child and make it helpful to the user. In order to ensure that the “root cause” of the problem is solved, you must make every detail of the product’s design justified. (This refers to the “prototyping” and “putting tests” mentioned above)
Even at a good company like Facebook, in order to check the candidate’s past performance, the interviewer will ask the details of every design.
In my opinion, it’s all based on their “design thinking” philosophy.
Conclusion
The foundation of good communication is built on two things:
- Deep understanding of users;
- A communication style that uses design thinking as a guideline and empathy as a key factor.
Project design lessons tend to enrich your story, and for me, five months as an interaction/visual design intern at Blibli.com taught me a lot (like solving problems for Blibli users) ), and these experiences have always driven me to be a better designer.
There are many concepts and methodologies we can learn from, and books on personal growth help us not only be good designers, but also better people. The designer’s goal is to make a good product, and a good product is a product that is always human-centered. So when we focus on our products, we have to focus on the long-term value of helping users through our products .
To use an analogy: Empathy is a key, perspective is a door, and the key decision makers and collaborators are sitting in the room. You need to constantly negotiate, think from the perspective of key decision makers, and let them know how you are building products for users, because sometimes people are focusing on the same place, but the form of achieving the goal is different.
Last but not least: keep learning, stay hungry stay foolish, keep becoming a better designer!
