Articulating Design Decisions, 3rd Edition

Chapter 1. Great Designers Are Great Communicators

A note for Early Release readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be the 1st chapter of the final book. The GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

Have you ever had to make changes to your design work you disagreed with? Me too! It’s not easy to talk about design, especially with people who aren’t designers. Yet, the ability to effectively articulate design decisions is critical to the success of any project, because the most articulate person usually wins. In fact, I would say that the difference between a good designer and a great designer is in their ability to not only solve problems with design, but to also articulate how their solution solves it in a way that’s compelling, fosters agreement, and gets the support needed to move forward. That’s what this book is about: getting support for your design decisions.

Lots of people are involved in our design process. People from all over the organization see the value of creating a great user experience (UX) and will tell you how they think it should look and work. Because the user experience has a long-term effect on the product, everyone is going to have ...