Articulating Design Decisions, 3rd Edition

Chapter 2. Becoming a Great Designer

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Let’s look at what makes a design successful, because that will form the basis for how we communicate about it. Remember the question I ask in interviews: What makes a good design good? There are many different ways we could answer this, but when it comes to creating the user experience (UX), a design is really only good if it solves a problem. Usually, we are trying to solve problems for the business by accomplishing a goal or improving a metric. But, if we’re also practicing user-centered design, we must make our designs effective for the people who will use them. Both of these are fairly well understood in the design community.

However, one thing that we often forget in the process is that there are other people involved who have influence over our project. It’s not enough to simply solve the problem for the business and users; we have to get the support of other people in the organization in order to move forward. So, if we take that into account, there are three things ...