Full commentary for this talk can be found at http://byekick.com/442 As user experience designers, our ideas define us. But without the ability to share our thinking, to persuade, we can end up frustrated wondering why a client couldn't see what we saw. UX comes with particular challenges - when we're often working at a conceptual level - so our ability to communicate our ideas is particularly important. Who is it for? Anyone presenting work, whether that be to internal teams (visual design / developers) or clients (internal or external). It's intended to be particularly of use to junior/mid-weight user experience designers. It's not a 'presentation skills' talks, but instead looks specifically at how we communicate UX deliverables in a way that its intended audience can understand, communicate and contribute to.

1. Communicating UX.
From ‘idea’ to ‘I agree’.
Andrew Travers
byekick.com | @byekick
Hi everyone,
Thanks for coming along
My name is Andrew Travers
Iʼm an independent user experience designer and strategist in London.

2. ‘Designers sell their work. Designers get up
in front of people and explain why they’ve
made the decisions they’ve made.
And if you can’t do that, you can’t call yourself
a designer.’
Mike Monteiro
5by5.tv/pipeline/43
@byekick #uxlx
This talk is about ideas, and how we talk about them.
What Mike Monteiro had to say recently to designers, has particular resonance, I think, for UX designers.
Working at a strategic and conceptual level, our ability to communicate our ideas is especially important.

3. What we talk about when
we talk about user experience
@byekick #uxlx
So, Iʼm want to share with you some thoughts on...
What we say,
and how we say it.

4. - Tell better stories
- Improve understanding
- Help our clients
- Create better experiences
@byekick #uxlx
How we move beyond site maps and grey wireframes, to begin to tell better stories about our users and our work
How we can improve understanding by sharing our process
How we help clients to make informed decisions
And - ultimately - how, together, we create better user experiences

5. ‘So, here’s the home page’
@byekick #uxlx
Iʼd like to start by sharing a story with you.
It comes from a few years ago, where I was part of a project team, heading on an early morning train to a clientʼs offices to
present a design concept. In between the coffee and the croissants, weʼd all agreed about the need to ʻtell a storyʼ,
To share what weʼd found, the problems weʼd identified, and how we were going to go about tackling them.
And then, off the train, and into the meeting, our lead designer opened his Mac, fired up Photoshop and said...
'So here's the home page'...
Well, you can probably guess what came next. They ate him alive. A brutal hour of merciless critique, picking apart every
aspect of the design from structure, to typography; from colour, to why the funny text was in Latin.
So, why HAD he done it?

6. Resisting the big reveal
@byekick #uxlx
There is - I think - a terrible temptation for us, in the manner of a modern-day Don Draper, to want to
open the red curtain and reveal our creations with a little panache.
Hoping for that moment where the client reels back,
astonished by our genius, our insight, our 'artistry'.
Perhaps weʼre just launching into the answer
before weʼve remembered to share what the question was in the first place.

7. Resisting the big reveal
We’re not artists, we’re designers.
We’re here to solve problems.
@byekick #uxlx
And, of course, we're not artists, we're designers and we're here to solve problems.
And if we canʼt define or describe the problem we're solving,
we can't expect our clients - or, for that matter, our fellow developers and designers -
to see our work in its true context,
to provide us with the critique we need,
and to work with us to find good solutions together.

8. ‘If we believe design is such a valuable lens to
view the world through and a fantastic mental
mode for problem solving, we should open it
up to everyone. Not doing so is double-speak.’
Frank Chimero
‘Designers Poison’
blog.frankchimero.com
@byekick #uxlx
I say ʻtogetherʼ, and I mean together.
This comes from Frank Chimeroʼs review of AIGAʼs recent One Day For Design round table on Twitter
If we know how great, how powerful design can be, donʼt we
have a duty to involve others?

9. Framing the scene
@byekick #uxlx
Iʼd argue that this is at least as true for user experience designers as it is for any other designer.
Because weʼre still at that step remove from the design execution of a user interface...

10. Framing the scene
Explain what has informed your work.
And what your work will inform.
@byekick #uxlx
Weʼve a yet harder role to play in explaining not just what has informed our work -
the research, the design principles - but also what our work will inform:
Where it begins and where it ends.
Connecting the dots between ux, design, and development and how, together they evolve

11. Addressing the fear
@byekick #uxlx
Before working with creative agencies, I used to sit on the other side of the table as a client.
And my theory - and my experience - is that clients often have a fear lurking at the back of their minds when they work with
designers.
And that fear goes something like this:
This designer doesnʼt really understand the unique and special nature of this business
This designer has already decided on a solution, and are going to give it to me whether I want it or not
This designer wants me to be their guinea pig for an untested idea
And the way I think we best counter this fear is by being humble and by being open.
...

12. Addressing the fear
Humility isn’t a tactic, it’s a mindset.
@byekick #uxlx
And I donʼt mean using humility as a tactic to disarm and flatter,
but as the fundamental underpinning to how we approach our work.
Sounds easy, but when weʼre very often the most expensive person at the table, itʼs easier said than done.
It can take confidence and guts.

13. De ning the problem
@byekick #uxlx
Whether weʼre starting from an expert evaluation, field research, analytics, or stakeholder interviews,
itʼs really important we ʻshowʼ rather than ʻtellʼ what we understand the design problem to be.

14. De ning the problem
There’s a di erence between showing
and telling.
@byekick #uxlx
And that we donʼt take sole ownership of what that problem is, but share our understanding of it.
And sometimes we can do this best by just getting out of the way,
and putting the client and user closer in touch with one another.
Hereʼs how Leisa Reichelt did this, on a project we worried on together last year for an charity called ʻStartHereʼ.

15. ‘D. is 19 and is currently homeless and has
been since his care home ‘refused care’ of him.
He sleeps on friends’ sofas but manages to
attend college. He’s had problems with drug
use in the past and has been in prison for shop
lifting and assault. He is bi-polar which
a ects his con dence very much. He avoids
social networking sites as in the past his peers
have been abusive towards him.’
Start Here is a charity that helps the most vulnerable in society - those with the poorest literary skills, and difficult personal
circumstances - get access to information they need, when they need it.
Leisa presented a series of slides like this one in near-silence - letting the experience of our interviewees come through
directly to those in the room.
And it was all the more powerful - and moving - for Leisa having that confidence to resist the temptation to translate and
interpret, and instead let them get closer to the difficult and complex lives of their users all by themselves.
The stories that we tell in explaining our work help put the focus where it should be. Not on us, but on the end user.

16. Establishing a lingua franca
@byekick #uxlx
How we tell these stories matters.
A shared, common language matters -
respecting both the language and conventions of the clientʼs business, and
bridging the gap between the clientʼs world and ours.
Two years ago at EuroIA, Scott Thomas - the design director for Barack Obamaʼs extraordinary presidential campaign - talked
about the limitations of wireframes and their disconnect with the language of the political campaign staff he was working
alongside.
So, for the Obama site, he split the strategic wireframes from the functional - those that contained the component building
blocks of a set of pages, and the purpose or story they were there to tell.
In other words...

17. Secondary nav Placeholder Search Carousel
@byekick #uxlx
In other words, he explained their rationale not in - this - the arcane language of the information architect, but in this

18. Persuade Represent Educate Activate
@byekick #uxlx
The argot of the politician
Making it easier for his campaign staff to engage,
easier to imagine how this would translate in execution and with their messaging,
and where and how they could best contribute.

19. Showing our working
@byekick #uxlx
When weʼre building our argument, rather than presenting a fait accompli
we need to show our working
To take our client on the journey with that we ourselves embarked upon:
where we started,
how our thinking evolved,
the ideas we tried and discounted.
...

20. Showing our working
Understand what didn’t work
to inform what might.
@byekick #uxlx
Iʼd argue that we should spend almost as much time showing what didnʼt work as much as what did.
Because itʼs in collectively understanding what didnʼt work, that we inform our understanding of what might,
and that we counter the ʻfearʼ I mentioned earlier of the imposed design, the impossible notion of the single ʻrightʼ solution.

21. Explaining our thinking
@byekick #uxlx
Itʼs in this sharing of our thinking, that we let clients in
- where we turn from being the anointed expert - in heavy quotation marks -
to collaborating directly with a group of people to reach a shared conclusion.

22. Explaining our thinking
This isn’t about language and style
but method and mindset.
@byekick #uxlx
This isnʼt, I think, about just language and style, but method and mindset
about how we see our role in relation to our colleagues and our clients,
and in amplifying the voice of the user.
That isnʼt about just involving them at the research stage, but sketching and analysing together, removing the client/agency
barrier wherever its possible to do so.
So, a word on what our end point of that might look like.
In a piece for Johnny Holland, Jared Spool talked about the danger of expert-led recommendations.
Hereʼs what he had to say...

23. ‘Making recommendations is the easy way
out, so it feels like the best path. But, in the
long run, it’s a trap. The house odds are
against you and eventually, it will all come
crumbling down.’
Jared Spool
@byekick #uxlx
Rather than ʻmaking recommendationsʼ, he argues that what the best UX teams do, is to ʻsuggest experimentationʼ,
a more collaborative, exploratory, agile approach.
And - for me - thatʼs it right there.
Thatʼs the point we stop being the mythical designer-as-artist, the Don Draper
and become the more mature, trusted, designer-as-consultant.
It seems to me that
Itʼs worth sacrificing a little bit of short-term ʻwowʼ for the longer-term understanding
- and increasing the chances of our work being sustained long after weʼve concluded our engagement
...So, Iʼm going to pick out five points to wrap up.

24. 1. SHARE, NOT TELL
Our role is, in part, to reconnect clients with their
audience, not to prove how clever we are. Don’t get in the
way, it’s not about us.
...So, Iʼm going to pick out five points to wrap up.
1. We share, not tell.
We need to help bring clients closer to their users.
And to resist inserting ourselves inbetween them.
We share experiences to improve an experience.

25. 2. DON’T BE A ‘ROCKSTAR’. ROCKSTARS ARE WANKERS.
We need to share what we learn as designers, to act as a
guide and facilitator. However ‘expert’ we might be, the
best solutions come with the active contribution of others.
2. Donʼt own the problem to the exclusion of others.
The more we involve the people weʼre working with - designers, developers, clients -
the better informed and more robust our approach is likely to be.

26. 3. MIND YOUR LANGUAGE
We need to connect our work to not just the priorities, but
the language of our clients too. We shouldn’t leave it to
them to join the dots between our theory and their practice.
3. Mind your language
If we can adapt and reflect our clientsʼ world back at them, we avoid leaving it to them to translate our world into theirs -
And the end result is more effective critique of our work,
because that IS we want that, RIGHT?

27. 4. SHOW YOUR WORKING
From preparatory sketches to discarded ideas - we deepen
our client’s appreciation of our thinking. Our openness
gives permission for them to be open too.
4. Showing our working
By removing the mystique and barriers to understanding our work,
the more we allow the client to be a fuller, more engaged part of the design process with us -
and to understand: our role and why we are proposing what we are proposing.
Thereʼs a bit of pragmatism here too -
weʼre dealing with the common ʻbut, what ifʼs?ʼ up front, and
testing the assumptions our work is based upon,
rather the putting up our design proposals to be shot down

28. 5. BE SPOOL, NOT DRAPER
By moving from ‘conveyancing’ to ‘collaboration’, we share
together, we learn together, we make things better, together.
And lastly, ʻBe Spool, not Draperʼ.
Suggest and collaborate rather than make recommendations.
Thatʼs got to be a richer experience for our clients, but for us too.
Sharing together,
learning together,
Making things better, together.

29. Thanks.
Credits
Red curtain by Pietroizzo, licensed under Creative Commons
ickr.com/photos/pietroizzo/3450744881/
Thanks for listening.