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Poster prompts to avoid Design-isms
Design-ism: A word or phrase designers use that most people don’t understand.
Two weeks ago I posted a story about Why Design-isms are a problem in the UX Collective.
I highly recommend reading it for context, but for those who can’t be assed, here’s the gist:
“Design-isms are a growing problem that we need to recognise because people don’t understand them. These catch-all terms also mean different things to different people. In order to give ourselves the best chance of communicating a clear, accurately understood message, we need to start coming up with simpler alternatives. This process will almost certainly take longer and require more cognitive effort for us as designers, but it’s the only way.”
Towards the end of my story, I spoke about some of the practical methods I’ve personally been using to try and combat this issue. One of these suggestions was to create tangible prompts, and herein lies the purpose of this post.
Prompting tools: Posters
Tangible prompts act as a great visual reminder to be more conscious of the words we’re using to communicate. For my office, I created a set of posters with design-isms and alternative wording side-by-side. Each poster represented a different design-ism category. My original categories were “What I do”, “Methods”, and “Things I make”.
Just to reiterate, the expectation is not for you to stop every time you see these posters and feel like you have to memorise every single one. Altering the way we speak isn’t going to happen overnight. Behavioral change is much more of a slow burn. Even if it’s just getting you to pause and think about how you might avoid design-isms in the future, this is a win.
