Design beyond deliverables

Shape meaningful conversations around early-stage design, and get better feedback.

Nicole Nardelli
UX Collective
Published in
13 min readMar 14, 2022
Experience factory from Austin Govella in Collaborative Product Design: Help Any Team Build a Better Experience
Illustration from the book Collaborative Product Design: Help Any Team Build a Better Experience by Austin Govella

Digital products are more complex today than ever before. Creating them requires multiple team members and other stakeholders, each with their own set of skills and expertise. There is a lot of communication around design, and all the design deliverables that we produce are also aiming to support this communication. However, when speaking to people who are not actively involved in what you are working on, abstract design deliverables hardly trigger discussion, and speeding up towards a visual output seems to be the only way to get an active contribution. However, leveraging a more concrete output means introducing too many design choices while still leaving a lot to speculation. In the past year, I’ve questioned myself a lot on what I was doing and how I could make early-stage design more inclusive to get an active contribution from all the stakeholders from the very beginning.

Great design starts by bringing people together

As a designer, the people I collaborate with are very different from one another and with very different backgrounds. Sometimes when a project is very big, more than one company, each one with its own specialty, is involved in the same project.

All these people have an influence on our work and they can contribute to making or breaking a design. This is why collaboration around design is so important. And collaboration without attaining a shared understanding can’t happen effectively.

Tweet from Jared Spool: “Teams that attain a shared understanding are far more likely to get a great design than those teams who fail to develop a common perception of the project’s goals and outcome.”

“Everything seems fine to me, let’s go on”

Almost a year ago now, in the company where I was previously working, we had to work on a very big project with lots of very different stakeholders involved.

One day we were in a meeting where we were discussing some early-stage design work. That kind of work with lots of text, boxes, and arrows everywhere, so to speak. The meeting ended up with them saying that everything was fine and that we could move forward. They had just a few questions and nearly no objection. We all know what this means: either you’ve done a very good job, or the people you were talking to didn’t understand a thing of what you just showed them. It goes without saying, mine was the second case.

Disaster girl meme. Girl in the foreground laughing, house in the background on fire. Text: “Everything is fine, perfectly fine”.

I told you this story but I could have told you many others because this is a scenario that I’ve experienced very often. “Everything seems fine to me, let’s go on” but then all the problems in the world start to pop out the day before the release.

But what’s different about this story though, is that this time after one of those meeting a person reached out to me privately and said:

“Everything looks good to us, but we are having a hard time visualizing what you are showing us, and to imagine how the finished product would look like, would it possible to see a draft, a prototype or something?”
— One of many stakeholders

After these words, we continued the design work with the idea of attaining something more concrete to share, wireframes in our case. And when this happened people started to take part in the discussion much more than before. And here as expected problems started to pop up. And months after sharing those wireframes we were still dealing with changes on things that I thought we had already agreed on.

On small and not very complex projects this is not such a big deal, because the things that are popping up are usually fewer, smaller, and can be fixed easily. But when projects are starting to become more complex and there are many people involved, fixing things becomes much more difficult, expensive, and time-consuming.

There is a lot of communication around design…and it’s probably the most challenging part of our job

What’s clear is that there is a lot of communication around design. And I believe this is probably the most challenging part of our job.

All the design deliverables that we produce play a huge role in our communication process. Sketches, content mapping, user journeys, diagrams, wireframes are tangible representations of our thinking and play a huge part in helping us communicate and share what we are working on.

But the thing is that if the people in front of us don’t understand what we are showing them, and what we are trying to communicate, we don’t enable them to give an active contribution from the very beginning, and that work won’t go ahead healthily.

Humans are visual creatures: abstract documentation hardly triggers discussions

Seeing things with our own eyes helps us to understand things since we don’t have to use our imagination.

User journeys, spreadsheets, information architecture, diagrams, user flows,….All these deliverables that we create to support our design process require a lot of effort to be conceptualized. It can be a real struggle for people who have not been involved actively in the work, to follow and visualize what we are trying to explain to them.

Confused meme: 4 different shots of a woman with a confused facial expression. On the front some mathematical formulas

We can’t take for granted that people will ask for clarification, especially if we are dealing with people outside the team, or that have not been directly involved in the project, that could experience a lack of confidence in raising concerns.

Another very common situation that I’ve experienced is people thinking they understood but they haven't. Have you ever spent minutes talking about something for then realizing at the end that everybody in the room was thinking about two different things?

“So many people in the room with so many different backgrounds will have a very difficult time having a shared understanding”.
— Aaron Irizarry

When the discussion around design starts at the end

If the discussion around design only starts when stakeholders are put in front of a visual output, this could be too late:

☝️ Visual deliverables introduce too many factors and the discussion that can potentially spiral into architecture, layout, content, and anything else, while still leaving a lot to speculation

✌️ Overwhelms stakeholders, it’s difficult to focus on a single point

🤟 Substantial parts are left out from the discussion, and infinite iterations/reworks begins

Toy story meme. Buzz Lightyear talks to Woody and tells him: “If you put your mind to it you can do anything”. Woody represents a wireframe.

To accommodate stakeholders’ struggles, without realizing it, we found ourselves designing from the UI-in even if we started with very different intentions. We don’t want to get at that point, we want people to be able to understand things and give an active contribution from the very beginning in order to avoid getting into an infinite rework loop.

Text, boxes, and arrows are too abstract…visual outputs are too concrete

If designing with text, boxes, and arrows is too abstract, detailed wireframes are too concrete and leave out too many things that at some point will come back.

We needed to design on the line between content and visual representation and find a workflow that can meet stakeholders’ needs while respecting the process.

Help people visualize early-stage design effectively

In the past year, I’ve become much more aware of how digesting early-stage design can be difficult for people who did not actively take part in the process of thinking about it. There is this very inspiring talk from Aaron Irizzary around the idea of helping people visualize abstract concepts that helped me a lot in understanding what was going on in our process.

I started questioning was doing and what I could have done differently to communicate my early-stage design work in a digestible way so that everyone could give an active contribution from the very beginning.

0. First things first…choose the right deliverable

I know that this blog post it’s about visualizing abstract documentation, but before getting into that I felt the need to specify that without first choosing the right deliverable all the following observations wouldn’t have reason to exist. We need solid foundations upon which we can make our conversations happen.

Something that I recently started considering more is the audience will be dealing with the deliverable:

  • have they been involved in the design from the very beginning and all along?
  • are they participating in building the product with you?
  • what’s the goal of the session and what’s/how much is worth sharing to attain that goal?

From there we can start adjusting the fidelity of the deliverable to the conversation so you can have the right conversation with the right audience. I think this is something that tricked me in the past: sharing details that for that particular audience was irrelevant. This infographic from Austin Govella’s book conveys the idea pretty well.

Graph that shows that the more the stakeholders are far from the project the more fidelity your design needs
— Austin Govella in Collaborative Product Design: Help Any Team Build a Better Experience

I don’t do that often (maybe I should) but something that also can help is laying out all the stakeholders with a stakeholders map.

1. Make others experience things by themselves

The closer you are to the act of thinking the easier it gets to attain a shared understanding. The best way to help people visualize what we are trying to say is by making them experience things by themselves: through workshops, collaborative exercise/design studios. We all know that this is not always possible but experiencing things together helps us be on the same page.

2. Interactive conversations

Instead of holding presentations in front of people, which was leading everybody to a passive mode, I started encouraging interactive conversations, especially in critiques.

Using paper and pen to draw things together externalizes the conversation, and can help us express our thoughts, and better understand those of others. Writing slows the conversation down and creates multiple interfaces for communications. Adding arrows, icons, and using sticky notes that can be moved around, and to which people can point, can help us express complicated ideas more effectively.

Drawing together encourages collaboration, and can help team members communicate during a meeting and attain a shared understanding.

3. Make things easier to digest

Usually, when there is a lot to discuss, what can happen is a lack of focus, and the risk is ending up with a very confusing session and overwhelmed stakeholders. Here are some of the things I started paying more attention to:

  • Show only one thing, not all the thinking: if then people are asking if you’ve tried a particular solution you can then say yes, and maybe show them. But if you state all the option everything at once everything is tangling up.
  • Slow down: the faster you go the harder it gets to visualize what you are saying and to keep the focus. I started making sure people had the time to internalize and think about what I was saying and showing, by making frequent pauses or if needed giving them some time to look at things on their own, and come back with feedback in another moment.
  • Break down things into smaller chunks: when presenting flows, scenarios, and so on I started avoiding sharing all the possible sub-scenarios of the current scenario I was sharing. One scenario at a time.
  • Avoid having too much to share: sometimes I realized I ended up sharing way too much information. I started being mindful around that and avoiding having too many things to share by breaking down the session into multiple sessions or by setting up some regular catch-up meetings so that I’ll never end up with too many things to share.

4. Add dimension to flat deliverables

The most tricky part for me lately was to engage people with content mapping and user journeys. For whatever reason, this is something that seems to be difficult to share with people who haven’t been close to the project in every step, especially when working remotely.

Lately, I started experimenting with priority guides that could be considered an alternative to wireframes.

Example of a priority guide.
https://alistapart.com/article/priority-guides-a-content-first-alternative-to-wireframes/

As you can see from the example, there is no distraction conveyed by the layout, the focus is on content which is sorted by hierarchy from top to bottom. This kind of pagination gives a sense of space and dimension to the content, that helps you imagine the final result, but without distraction. The focus stays on the content.

Lately, I also started experimenting with a mix between the priority guide and a user flow map instead of using a scenario mapping made out of sticky notes that misses the spatial elements and it ends up being flat.

Example of a priority guide + flow map

I used these two examples because those are the ones I’ve been experimenting with lately and that proved to be very useful, but I’m sure that this concept could be applied to lots of other different cases. The idea is to add more “spaciality” to flat deliverables (like the ones below) to convey a visual cue to something that otherwise would be only text.

User journey example
Object mapping example
Information architecture example

5. Use case driven storytelling

Stories are a very powerful tool. It’s one of the most natural ways to share information, and it’s as old as the human race.

Storytelling in user experience is nothing new. Stories have always been part of user experience design as scenarios, storyboards, personas. Stories help us to ground the work in a real context by connecting design ideas to the people who will use the product.

We want people to focus on the story. We need to talk about users doing things, and not how things look like or pieces of screen. Showing and interface by walking people through stories also help us to show things in a logical order and keeps people focused on the goals.

Something we also experimented with, was with bringing those stories to life. In a project I had the chance to work on the interaction between the digital and physical space was a bit difficult to visualize, so we decided to use Playmobil to recreate some of the scenarios.

6. It’s ok not to get everything right away

Most of the time, when stepping into these sessions I was expecting to finish the meeting with all the feedback I needed. But the truth is that when we work with complexity it can sometimes be very difficult if not impossible for people to grasp everything in a single meeting.

Sometimes we need to give people the means and the space to explore our design at their own pace. It’s ok to be confused, the important thing is to be aware of it so we can act upon this confusion.

Lately, I ran my first asynchronous design critique with Loom, and it worked very well. I also got very positive feedback from my colleagues, in particular, they said they enjoyed the fact that they could stop the video to have some time to look at the design or go back to a certain point to relisten if not 100% clear.

Linkedin post from myself explaining my experience with Loom and async design critique.
My experience with async design critique on Loom

7. Moving between different degrees of fidelity it’s part of the game

Not so much ago, after defining user flows and content mappings with stakeholders we started defining the interfaces how it would look like. While discussing some of the screens we realized that some of the things were still unsolved, so we went back to the foundations to rediscuss them.

Despite all the attention paid to communicating the design effectively, I was feeling like there was still a hole in the process. Then I realized that this will happen all the time. We can’t control it. We can’t control if people are taking the right care of attention, we can’t control if people realized that they haven’t grasped everything, we can’t control if people that day are inspired enough to make that kind of intuition you needed. What we can control is how we react to situations and how we shape the conversation to make it effective.

Design is what happens in the middle of conversations. And conversations are all but linear. Shifting between different degrees of fidelity to communicate what you need to communicate it’s not a hole in the process but it's just part of it. Navigating those dynamics and reacting to them is what makes the difference.

Be intentional in how you shape the conversation

Good conversations start by being intentional about what we are trying to achieve. The goal of the session, the audience and their exposure to the process, the distance (remote?), and the artifact itself are all factors that are going to influence our conversation. If we are conscious of these factors we can be intentional when laying the ground for meaningful conversations to happen by acting on:

  • the time (will the conversation be synchronous or asynchronous?)
  • the channel (will the conversation happen on Slack? Zoom? Figma/Loom/…/?)
  • the structure (will this be a presentation? a critique? a workshop?)
  • the fidelity (what’s the fidelity of the artifact that will be presented? is there something that we can do to make it more digestible?)

So we can start shaping meaningful conversations around design.

Tweet from Aaron Irizarry: “Quality is found in well crafted interfaces, code, visual aesthetics, and industrial designs, but often behind these artifacts there are conversations, cultures, and processes that enable teams to produce great designs.”
https://medium.com/beyond-the-screen/the-other-half-of-deliverables-a683b1bd3287

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