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Words as Material Words as Material Words as Material Words as Material Words as Material Words as Material

Words as
Material

Words as
Material

Nicole Fenton – March 12, 2015

I want to start with a quote from writer, activist, and teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh. In Being Peace, he writes:

“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in every sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist.”

Thich Nhat Hanh calls this concept interbeing. He goes on to say that the sun is also in the sheet of paper; and the lumberjack who cut down the tree; and his parents; and the wheat that made his morning bread; and so on. All of these things make it possible for the paper to exist.

I bring up this story, because it helped me understand systems at a deeper level. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it takes to make a design project successful and even possible in the first place. I have a few hunches and I believe words play an important part in the process. But before I get to that, let’s look at how the paper metaphor relates to us as designers.

How design works

Our work depends on many things: time, money, technology, materials, constraints, and most importantly, the lives, attention, and experiences of other people. We participate in and often orchestrate a process that’s bigger than we are. Design requires collaborators, contributors, customers, toolmakers, factory workers, marketers, postal workers, call center agents, you name it. If we look closely, we can see that people are at the heart of everything we make.

When I started writing this talk, I asked my designer friends on Twitter to answer this question: What’s the number one thing that sabotages projects for you? Here are a few of their answers:

Ian Marquette (@ianmarquette):

a lack of clear understanding between myself and clients, which basically comes down to communication.

Mark Forscher (@garbnzgh):

difference in expectations / poor communication

Zak Greene (@zearl):

feedback from 18794387294 different people

Matt Felten (@mattfelten):

Miscommunication. Handoffs to silos. Whatever the opposite of collaboration is.

Jonathan Myers (@jnthnmyrs):

lack of extroverted thinking. One step at a time.

Davin Risk (@davin):

Same as life really… lack of clarity around intent.

These problems boil down to one thing: communication. Sharing ideas with other people. Working through decisions together to make something new. We’re here to make meaningful changes in the world, but we can’t do that if we don’t understand each other. We can’t ignore people or work around them.

If we want design to communicate, we need to communicate in the design process.

How communication works

So I’ve been thinking about what communication looks like in the design process. Here’s my take:

  1. Self: We start by thinking alone. We may be collaborating with friends or colleagues, but we still need space to make sense of what we’re making. We have to put it into terms we can relate to.
  2. Team: We also have to talk through it with our team. That’s where extroverted thinking comes in. We may need to sketch, or brainstorm ideas, or summarize what we’ve heard from interviews or user research. We have to get on the same page or find a shared language. Once we have a sense of what we’re doing, we can express those goals as requirements, come up with an approach, and move forward. All of these messy conversations help us gather consensus and work through the details.
  3. Product: After choosing a design direction, we can prototype it, refine it, and try to make it speak for itself. The product needs to reflect the goals and intent we set out to achieve and in some ways, it needs to stand on its own.
  4. Public: Once we’re clear on what we’re making, we build it. And if we’re lucky, we get to announce it and share it with the world.

As we move through each of these steps, the idea starts to solidify and become visible to people around us. This is why I think of design as a process of articulation. We join together to express an idea in a coherent form. We bring ideas to life. We connect the dots or build bridges for our users. That often means being specific about what a product does, who it’s for, why it matters, and how it works. We have to trek through a pile of ambiguity to do this.

More people, more problems

I want to share how I use words as material to move the design process forward. I hope these techniques make your life a little easier, whether you’re helping a client make decisions or making them yourself. (As an aside, whenever I use the word “client,” that could be a product lead or someone you work with. Whoever’s in charge of the product vision.)

Words as Material Words as Material Words as Material Words as Material Words as Material Words as Material

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1. No product vision

1. No product vision

Conflicting ideas are one thing—but it’s even harder to talk about an idea when there is no idea. I’m selfishly starting with this one, because I’ve seen it a lot in the past few years.

The client may be making a product or a website, but they don’t have a picture in mind of what it should be. Maybe they haven’t taken the time to daydream about it. They may be in reaction mode, or they may need help asking deeper questions about their values or intent, like where their business is going, or why they’re in business in the first place. I generally see this as a lack of leadership, but it can also be a lack of connection and team identity. Some people who work together don’t really have a bond or a shared purpose, and that can slow down the design process.

There are a few ways you can work through this. I start every project with a set of questions. I like food metaphors, so I call them Starter Questions, like an appetizer. These questions help me understand the client’s needs and vocabulary. I write down words they say and I reflect them back when it’s appropriate. I also dig deeper when people use empty words like “simple” or “user-friendly.” Those words don’t help you as a designer. When one person says “innovative,” they may be talking about how it looks or behaves. And when another person says it, they may be talking about the business model or the process that a user goes through.

Words are squishy and subjective. But if you take the time to build a shared language, that will help you when you’re presenting design directions. You can find some of the questions I ask in my Tiny Content Framework on GitHub.

Another thing you can do to help your client think through outcomes is to show them examples from competitors and teams outside their industry. Get them to talk about what they like and don’t like. Their taste is less important than their word choice. How do they react to things? Also pay attention to words they don’t say. Sometimes codifying your vocabulary is enough to steer you in the right direction.

There’s a common technique of writing a press release in the early stages of product design. The exercise is supposed to help you narrow down features and requirements and get you thinking about the product narrative. Etsy’s design director, Randy J. Hunt, calls this the “who, what, when, where, why, and how of your product.”

I do something similar, but I start even earlier and I make it more personal. I don’t talk to the press, so I find that exercise tricky in practice. Instead, I like to write letters to people that I know.

As a recent example, I’m working on an idea for a second book—an essay collection I want to edit and design. I started writing down the vision for the book by telling my friend Rachel about it in a letter.

Hi Rachel, Thanks so much for offering to give me feedback on my project! So, here goes. I’m working on a collection of stories from writers who’ve been through...

I told her what I was hoping to accomplish with the project, included examples of essays that might be in the book, and talked about the audience I want to reach. I didn’t actually send it to her (sorry, Rachel!), but the exercise helped me get started on my proposal. I went on to use the basis of that letter to invite early contributors to the project and reach out to agents. And I’ll use a very similar outline when I do a formal call for contributors.

Hi Jane, I’m working on a collection of stories from writers who’ve been through XXXXXX. I came across your piece in The Rumpus and wondered if you’d be interested in contributing to the project...

As you start to externalize your idea, it’s not enough to imagine a good outcome or define why it matters. You also have to articulate your goals so people can rally around them. That brings me to another communication problem: conflicting goals and expectations.

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2. Different goals and expectations

2. Different goals and expectations

Jean-Paul Sartre is known for saying, “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” But my friend Frank Chimero says, “Hell is other people’s undocumented assumptions.”

Gaps in expectations are especially tricky when your client has a different take on things. It only gets worse as you move out from there. Maybe the client is rushing you, or they haven’t given you enough information. Maybe some of your team members don’t like each other, or aren’t used to collaborating. This kind of unresolved internal confusion is a problem. It’s not necessarily your fault, but it can make things difficult.

If the gap is between people on your team, get them to talk to each other. Do a journey mapping exercise to walk through concrete steps users can take. Or interview them individually, and summarize the different perspectives you heard from your team. Whenever there’s a lack of clarity or agreement, questions are your biggest strategic tool.

Trust the weirdness of the process. When I’m working with writers, I like to use a metaphor of putting a puzzle together. You have to get all of the ideas on the table before you worry about how they connect, or which ones to cut. If you try to synthesize too early, you’ll leave someone out that’s important to the process and have to go back and have more conversations.

This problem can also crop up with the public. If there’s a gap between what the product team is making and what the marketing team is selling, you’re making false promises. You can help solve this by encouraging marketers to be honest and realistic about what your product does—and by clearly defining features and expectations with them early. Otherwise, they’re just going to make things up.

There’s another problem in there of telling the right story. If your team doesn’t agree on why the product is interesting, it’s going to be hard to market it. You can solve this perception problem in a couple of ways.

Card sorting exercises are useful for narrowing things down. I often do card sorts with my clients to get them to choose brand attributes or requirements. You can do a similar exercise by asking your team to choose and rank marketing messages. This is especially useful on teams of 10 or more people.

I’ve been known to write multiple choice questions and quiz product managers. Here’s an example from a couple of years ago. Safari is a digital reading service for web professionals.

Are any of these true about the books? These are the _____ titles.

Safari Flow is a(n):

Pick two. Safari Flow helps me, because:

They had a good product vision, but I had a hard time getting them to decide what was so great about the product. This is one way to play with that. I also like to do a Mad Libs exercise, which is in my Tiny Content Framework. Here’s an example of that for another client:

{Product name} {helps/lets} {audience noun} {verb} and {verb} {object} so they can {verb} {adverb}.
Chroma is a {noun} that lets you {verb} with {object}.
Chroma is a(n)... {field guide / visual guide / pocket reference / pocket guide / community of enthusiasts}.
Join Chroma to: {create a field guide / share curious things you find / discover guides and search nearby / tag birds, bugs, beers, and more}.

Get those words down and play with them. Expect to argue with each other. You don’t need a copywriter to do this. Plain language is better than jazzy puns.

Let’s move on to the next one.

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3. Oversimplifying the problem

3. Oversimplifying the problem

This one may be a personal peeve, but I’m sure you’ve experienced it before. Be wary of limiting language, absolutes, and either/or statements. Here are some examples I’ve heard:

These phrases struck me, because they come in the form of a statement with no room for debate or interpretation. “Just” is a particularly dismissive word, and Brad Frost wrote a fantastic post about that for the Pastry Box. We all get in a hurry and make assumptions, but our work is about being open to possibilities—not finding the one right way to solve a problem. We have to consider situations and feelings we haven’t experienced ourselves. One way to practice this is to use words with a little bit of nuance or gray area:

This is not so much a writing trick as an editing trick. But it’s a good way to make sure you have room to do your job.

Another way to avoid this problem is to work through different variations. If you think there’s more than one way to approach a problem, show how that plays out in the interface. Whenever I’m presenting ideas, I like to share 3 or more options. People tend to make better decisions when there are a few things to choose from. It also gives you a chance to be creative. Don’t get stuck on a content structure or specific wording in design concepts. Explore your options in the language too.

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4. Design doesn’t sell itself

4. Design doesn’t sell itself

We all know good design doesn’t sell itself. If it did, Apple wouldn’t spend a gazillion dollars a year on advertising. If you’re working on a Kickstarter or selling design to the public, you’ll have to explain yourself a little bit. You can use words as material in that process. For me, that often looks like the Mad Libs exercise I showed you. I also have a bunch of product questions that I like to ask. It’s almost like a spec sheet for planning out the content.

Another one of my favorite tricks is to record myself or use speech-to-text to transcribe my words. I write down a few questions I want to answer. Who are my main audiences and what do they need to know? This could be for a pitch or a marketing meeting, anything really. Grab a pair of headphones and a recording device. Walk around and interview yourself. Pick someone specific to talk to, and imagine they’re asking you those questions. It feels a little silly at first, but afterwards, you can print it out and highlight the phrases that are interesting or useful for what you’re making. Cut it up and scrap the rest. I use this trick a lot to write outlines for essays and conference talks.

To summarize, these are some of the ways I use words as material in the design process:

You can use these right now, and you’ll find more that work for you.

I want to close with an excerpt from an interview in The Believer with David Foster Wallace. He’s talking about the gap between ordinary citizens and people who work in specialized roles. He says:

“Think of the thrill of finding a smart, competent IT technician who can also explain what she’s doing in such a way that you feel like you understand what went wrong with your computer and how you might even fix the problem yourself if it comes up again. Or an oncologist who can communicate clearly and humanly with you and your wife about what the available treatments for her stage-two neoplasm are, and about how the different treatments actually work, and exactly what the plusses and minuses of each one are.
If you’re like me, you practically drop and hug the ankles of technical specialists like this, when you find them. As of now, of course, they’re rare. What they have is a particular kind of genius that’s not really part of their specific area of expertise as such areas are usually defined and taught. There’s not really even a good univocal word for this kind of genius—which might be significant. Maybe there should be a word; maybe being able to communicate with people outside one’s area of expertise should be taught, and talked about, and considered as a requirement for genuine expertise.”

I think we have a profound responsibility to do that kind of communication and translation in our work. As designers, we’re often the people defining the problem and coming up with solutions.

Using words as material along the way will always make our work better. Clarity moves us forward, where ambiguity can pull us back. If we place our words carefully, we can build a path for ourselves right out of the mud.

Thank you.

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