Design Communication

If a designer shows you work in progress, it’s a great sign. It means they’ve moved beyond a fear that all you’ll see is the broken stuff to a willingness to collaborate with you. Look at it in the spirit of collaboration. Ask questions about what they’re showing. Talk about where they’re headed with it. Feel free to ask if there’s any feedback the

Design isn’t magic and it isn’t art. It’s a craft. Design solves a problem within a set of given constraints. We’ll talk about why those constraints matter. Much as a doctor needs patients to practice their craft, a designer needs clients to practice theirs. Like walking into a doctor’s office, describing what’s wrong, and then having your doctor d

Critique isn’t about that instant reaction we might feel when seeing something, or about how we would change someone’s design to better solve an issue. Critique is a form of analysis that uses critical thinking to determine whether a design is expected to achieve its desired objectives (and adhere to any pertinent best practices or heuristics).

Avoiding assumptions is simple: ask about them.Yup. Ask yet more questions. Put your assumption out there and ask if it’s accurate. If it is, continue on with your insights. If it isn’t, you might need to adjust your thinking a little.

A well-designed world is a better world. I love knowing that a thoughtful piece of user interface makes someone’s life go a bit easier, whether it’s designing a menu that’s accessible to someone with low vision or watching my seventy-one-year-old father intuitively use an iPad for the first time. Good design has the power to change lives in big and

We hire professionals because we can hold them accountable. If you get audited, you better believe you’re taking your accountant with you to the hearing. If the credit card processing system on your site goes down, you want to know that your engineering team is on it. You also want to be able to call them into your office and ask what happened. Whe

Successful design projects need equal participation from the client and the designer. Yet the design process remains a mystery to the people who buy it. Design isn’t sausage. You’ll enjoy it even more if you understand how it’s made.

Central IdeaFeedback encompasses three forms: reaction, direction, and critique. Reaction and direction are limited in their ability to help us understand if the design choices we’ve made might work toward the product’s objectives. Critique, a form of analysis that uses critical thinking, is feedback that focuses on exactly that understanding.