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Why simple UX stories are best: the power of clarifying ambiguity
Why going back to basics can often be the best approach
Sometimes, telling the most straightforward UX story is the best approach.
One of the things I’ve often seen when reviewing other designers' portfolios is a desire to overcomplicate and overexplain. There’s a tendency to dive into the details and talk about everything you did, but that’s often not what your audience wants.
Instead, a simple story may be one of the most compelling: You listened to ambiguous requirements, worked to clarify them, and designed an intuitive user experience that people understood.
That simple story is at the heart of many design projects, and it’s often a designer’s strength that we often forget about.
Visualizing designs requires clearing up ambiguity
The best designers tend to ask many questions during meetings because they tie the answers they get to the mental sketch they’re making.
To many designers, this isn’t a big deal: after all, it’s just creating a sketch.
But to the rest of the team, it’s like a superpower. The fact that we’re thinking visually about what might be a list of requirements on a page is something most of the team can’t do.
Of course, this is just the first step of the design process. A decent sketch is nice, but you must explore different ideas, iterate on them, and more. This is why we often forget that this transformation is compelling to our audience.
This is because this sketching process is about confronting ambiguity. Imagine being told you need to “design a dashboard that points users in a bunch of different places.”
Could you sketch that out right away? Not really. It's incredibly vague, and we have no idea where we’re pointing users or why they’re going to these pages.
