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

I first purchased this book three years ago when I initially transitioned into the field of UX Design. From the opening chapter, the reader is offered invaluable nuggets of wisdom that really stick with you."The most important thing you could ask [a client or stakeholder]... What are we trying to communicate?"So simple, and yet so true. I've highlighted countless sections throughout the book and dog-eared far too many pages to be practical. And when the audiobook became available, I purchased that, too. It's become a regular listen for me as I sit and work. I've seen a measurable uptick in my performance as well as positive growth in my team member relationships as a direct result of the suggestions and pointers peppered through this book. I highly recommend this book, not just to UX Designers, but to anyone who struggles with verbal clarity when presenting new ideas or defending your decisions. This book is a true goldmine.(BTW, regarding the photo I've shared, the orange stains on the cover are from an orange soda that burst within a travel bag--a most unfortunate incident... But before I purchased the audiobook, I really did take this with me wherever I went!)

I cannot express how much I love this book for it's advice about communication and understanding of the design process in various sized companies. It's great to hear another designer voice the frustrations I experience (If I have to explain what Lorem Ipsum is one more time...). He offers excellent advice on communication that I will be sharing with my team and my company. I highly recommend watching the author himself present some of the same information from this book at a conference, which can be found on Vimeo. He is funny as well as articulate.The only downside to this book is that although the author is correct that communication makes a big difference, there are still other factors that can work against you as a designer (or anywhere). Being articulate will only do you so much good if your gender, skin color, or other factors chip away at your authority from the get-go. These factors are also scientifically proven to impact how others feel about what you said and even how they feel about you as a person. The author has most assuredly never been asked illegal interview questions like I was on one of my first interviews out of college ("Do you live alone, with your parents, or with a significant other?"). His admittedly "easy" experience with getting side jobs in college, and the fact that he was put into a management position immediately after college might not be based exclusively on communication, though it does have a huge impact. I've been on design teams talking to external clients in which women got considerably more pushback regardless of how articulately they explained the choices. His blind spot is partially evidenced by his choice of a (white) male quote at the beginning of every single chapter. Although this author hits communication points on the head, he comes across as tone deaf to diversity despite dedicating a lot of his book to empathizing with others beyond yourself. I wish he could have found one person who was not white and male that he found inspiring. Were all other people from those eras terrible at communicating or were there other factors involved?This doesn't mean I think he is incorrect in his communication advice, nor do I want him to make half of this book about diversity in the tech industry. I think a mention of unconscious bias would suffice, because every designer has their own unconscious bias that can impact how they talk to others he already mentioned (stakeholders, product managers, software engineers, etc). I would recommend reading about unconscious bias after this book as it is a psychological phenomena that impacts communication and would be a great companion to this information.

Articulating Design Decisions is a must have book for anyone in the creative field, I'd even argue that people who are solely developers, and rarely touch designs should read it too. Tom has done an excellent job in tackling the issues that we all face when explaining our choices to our clients and the rest of the team.One of the chapters that really hit home for me is early on in the book and talks about really understanding that your clients are humans and that their focus is not always 100% on the project at hand because they have so much else going on in their lives. It truly helps you build empathy and a greater understanding of why some clients might come off as rude, disinterested, or hard to deal with. For me it really made me reflect on past experiences and consider why the interactions we had happened in such a way.The greatest strength of the book is that there are numerous real life examples, from Tom's on life, that really go into outstanding detail. His ability to recollect that information to such a degree really shows him to be an expert at building his arguments for his decisions. This also makes reading the book that much easier because it creates a very tangible explanation of the concepts that are discussed.This book could even be considered as a translation of client talk that helps us understand how to decipher the feedback we are given. Clients may not understand design, but they can still understand when something is wrong or not communicated correctly. Tom goes into great detail helping the reader understand what it is that the client is asking for, or at least how to ask the right questions to get there.There are several pages dedicated to handling alternative designs, accounting for why we made our decisions, and how to be prepared for the inevitable barrage of questions. This is an invaluable section as I feel like I see few people taking on the extra work that Tom puts in but the end result of it is that it actually saves you time, to put it short, it is very brilliant.If you are a designer, developer, project manager, artist, or anyone who touches design at all, you need to pick this book up because it will only help you become better at your trade. I really do feel like this is going to be one of those classic books that becomes required reading for everyone.

Great book with really helpful insight on viewing the perspective of everyone on your team as well as the client.

This is one of the best books for designers in the user experience realm. Everyone wants to have a say in UX, but not everyone should have a say when it comes to making design decisions. And as Greever states at the beginning: the most articulate person usually wins.Greever doesn’t just take a dive into why people want to meddle with your job so much; he gives advise on how to communicate better and position yourself as the UX expert in an interdisciplinary team. Many situations he described weren’t new to me after several years in UX, but some of his solutions are smarter than what we were doing at my company. I was happy to re-evaluate our process and make small changes with my team.„Articulating Design Decisions“ should be a mandatory read for everyone who starts their first UX job. It will save you years of frustrations when dealing with clients, managers and other people who aren't familiar with the design process and who love to stray too far away from human centered design to blindly push some KPIs and ROIs.If you have several years of work experience you will still find insights and good suggestions on how to communicate better to win some ground when dealing with people who don’t accept you as the expert on UX matters or who want to push their often detrimental ideas into the process.

This book is excellent. I’ve gone through it slowly, writing notes, highlighting, and marking sections to reference with sticky notes. I’ve lived just about every example illustrated. It’s helpful to have an awareness of the types of objections and the types of stakeholders feedback.I’m a Product Manager and have found this book immensely helpful. The author does a great job of offering suggestions for how to get to the root of the objection, overcome them, and help move the conversation forward. This book was recommended to me by the lead developer. I highly recommend it for not only designers but programmers and product manager as well and really any stakeholder who wants their team to build digital solutions more efficiently.

There's lots of great examples and advice here. I doubt the neatly, linear "process" presented ever matches reality, but the challenges are relatable and solutions sound. I'd say by the last third of the book it started to feel a bit long-winded. I skimmed till the end.

Der Größte Teil des Design Jobs ist nicht Designs auszuarbeiten, sondern die Designs abzustimmen, erklären und verteidigen. Dieses Buch ist eines der wenigen, das jungen Designern praktische Tipps und Anleitungen gibt, wie sie ihr Geschick Designs zu verargumentieren, steigern können. Vom Ausarbeiten von Argumenten bis zum Umgang mit Stakeholdern ist das Buch gut strukturiert und verständlich aufgebaut. Sehr zu empfehlen.