On Design Artefacts.
Are your design artefacts being used to support change, or are they just decorating the walls of your office and making you feel very UX-y?
I ask because recently I’ve noticed a worrying trend: I’m being asked an awful lot for artefact templates. Not inspiration, not examples, but templates. There’s an expectation that experience design tools have evolved to the point of fill-in-the-blanks, and for me that’s pretty scary. Not because I think that templates are necessarily a bad thing — there are many times where they’re helpful and save time that could be better spent on thinking through the design problems at hand. But therein lies the problem — the objective doesn’t seem to be saving time or working more efficiently. They’re being used to create artefacts as deliverables in their own right. And that’s just not cool.
Design by numbers
As the popularity of UX, CX, SD, UCD and any other number of acronyms continues to rocket ever upwards, I find myself wondering if it’s because of the relatively low barriers to entry. On the surface of things, UX artefacts are pretty easy to pull together. We’ve all seen shiny personas and user journeys, and thought ‘yeah, I can do that.’ Anyone with reasonable skills in Illustrator, Sketch or even Powerpoint (gasp!) can cobble together something that looks the part.
Take personas, for example. Sure, we’re all aware that they shouldn’t be stereotypes, and that they should include more depth than simple demographics, but as long as you add some stories about how Product X fits into their ‘life ecosystem’ you’ll be sweet, right? Same goes with user journeys (or customer journeys, or service blueprints, or journey maps. Whatever your team is calling it this week.) Highlight a couple of different touch points — because we know that most people have more than one device — add some pain points and don’t forget to show that there’s some organisational impact! Pop in some cute iconography and an illustration or two and you’re ready to roll.
But what comes next?
If your personas are too broad, too basic or don’t align to the task at hand, there’s a danger that they just won’t get used. Or worse yet, they’ll be used to justify any number of pre-existing ideas or agendas. “But it’s what Trendy Trudy would want!” cries the product owner as they sneak in yet another feature of questionable customer value under the protest that Trudy is a tech-savvy, millennial early adopter, and would definitely be up for a bot that uses her very private health data to personalise her shopping experience. And you know what? That’s on you. You’ve created a monster, and you’ve made it look easy. Guess who is just going to make their own persona next time? Personas are easy; genuine, useful insights are not.
It’s a similar story with journey maps. If it doesn’t actually expose the root causes of pain points, or demonstrate insights that can’t be thought up in 5 minutes of quiet reflection, then it’s just another piece of paper. You might as well write a 50 page slide deck, because you’re not making a good case for design as a way to solve problems.
Design artefacts shouldn’t be the end of the story, they’re your characters and your plot drivers. They’re inputs that feed into the rest of your process, building a case for change, highlighting focus areas and providing a clear north star that can be returned to throughout your project. It’s absolutely crucial that they provide enough depth and insight for you and your team to make informed decisions. Without a clear understanding of their purpose, artefacts risk only skimming the surface, doing more harm than good.
So you think templates make design too accessible?
Not quite. I’m not against templates because of some smug sense that only designers can create artefacts. Quite the opposite, in fact. I think that design artefacts should be living, breathing pieces that everyone can collaborate on and contribute to in order to develop a well-rounded view on a problem that needs to be solved (or discovered). I’m against templates as a follow-the-bouncing-ball approach to artefact creation, because there’s a real danger that genuine insights will get missed.
I’m also not advocating that all design artefacts should be created on post-its, or sketched in the lowest possible fidelity. Visual communication has a really strong role to play in getting people on board with a change effort, and it really annoys me when visual design is dismissed as nothing more than window dressing. But it’s a balance. Spending weeks creating a beautiful artefact that has no meaningful insights is a waste of everyone’s time. Following a template that misses the point, as you try to shoehorn insights into a predefined journey is also a waste of time. Using design guidelines to make consistent, attractive artefacts that are shareable and communicate clearly is not.
Templated or not, one simple fact remains. If your design artefacts aren’t being used to actively bring about change, you’re doing it wrong.
Ok then smarty pants, how should I be designing artefacts?
It’s really easy to get caught up in evangelising the right way of doing things. The increased demand for design templates is, I suspect, largely based on an assumption that such a thing exists. But if we’re truly going to be successful in demonstrating the usefulness of design in solving the wicked problems out there, the very worst thing we can do is to productise and commoditise our outputs. Being rigid or purist about the way a particular artefact should look, feel or be used doesn’t help anyone. Instead, focus on how you can use that artefact to reach a solution that works for everyone involved — most importantly, one that will help to benefit the user.
Here’s how I generally like to approach it, but there are probably a million other ways that work just as well. Play around with what works for you, keeping in mind that it’s allowed to change over time.
- Determine what your artefact needs to achieve
Are you trying to get your client to see their customers as humans? Surface pain and pleasure points in a process? Drive senior buy-in? There are so many objectives that can be fulfilled by design artefacts, so it’s really important to spend time upfront working out what it is that you want your artefact to do. Consider the context of use — will it be a living document, to be scribbled on and amended and re-visited over a period of time? Or will it be a digital one — shareable and aspirational? Consider the audience — internal, client or board / executive? And finally, consider the scope. What information do you need to build a cohesive and useful piece of communication? What questions need to be answered, and what gaps need to be filled? Artefacts should never exist in a vacuum — if they’re not directly helping to answer a question or solve a problem then they’re not useful.
Bonus tip: clients or team members just asking for personas or journey maps right off the bat shouldn’t be a thing. It’s your job to work out what they are really asking for, and adjust your artefacts accordingly. You don’t go to a doctor asking for an MRI without a reason, and then walk away without an explanation of the results, do you?
2. Start with a pen and paper
Before you even open your computer, sketch out your content on paper first. Map out the basics of your journey, persona or blueprint. Once you have a clear idea of the information you need to communicate, then you can begin thinking about how best to represent that visually. The standard swim lanes of a user journey or blueprint can be useful, but they can also be distracting and limiting. It might make more sense to represent the journey as an ecosystem, storyboard or a network of interactions. Your persona might be better served as a scenario or profile. You might even be better off spending your time on a well-written research report (these can look nice too!).
3. Listen, learn, refine
Ideally, you won’t be producing artefacts in isolation. Use your access to users, stakeholders and team members to really get into the guts of what you’re trying to communicate. Card sort activities can be really useful for this purpose — write out the steps of the journey as you understand it, and ask various people involved in the process to comment or adjust accordingly. At this point, all your props should be quite low fidelity, because it’s important that people can feel ok about challenging or changing them. It’s much easier to move a card than suggest an entire part of a beautifully designed document be removed.
4. Use design guidelines (not a template)
Once you’re ready to move your artefact to a higher fidelity output, it’s time to think about setting up some guidelines. This is really easy to do in programs like Sketch, but can just as easily be done in a document or presentation slide. Collate your colour scheme, font rules, images and icons — this will help make sure that you are communicating with a consistent visual tone. It’s particularly useful if you’re collaborating on the output, and if you’re working with a visual designer or front end developer, they’ll love you for it. Make sure your output aligns to the brand and style of the audience — this isn’t the time to get snarky about your client’s outdated font selection or icky colour scheme. Don’t underestimate the power of presenting an artefact that helps clients have that a-ha moment because it’s in a format they recognise.
5. Refine with the tools available to you (and your client)
You might be awesome at Illustrator, or some brand new graphics software that’s still in beta and only available to the cool kids. But unless you want to wholly own the responsibility for producing and updating the artefact (FOREVER) then you might want to consider using tools that are readily available to the whole team. And while I’d usually advocate only sending clients and stakeholders PDF versions of artefacts, sometimes they’ll want to get involved, and that’s definitely an opportunity you should be open to. Co-creation can lead to some of the most unexpected and wonderful insights. Where software is concerned, we’ve all heard it before — tools are only as useful as the output you can produce with them. There have been too many projects I’ve worked on where sharing, file formats, export size and version control have been way more troublesome than they should have been. These issues only detract from the quality of content, so if you can sort this out as early as possible everyone will be that much happier. And if all you have is Powerpoint or pieces of paper, then the onus is on you as a designer to make it work. Which leads on to my next point…
6. Don’t be precious
Your artefacts will likely go through any number of changes throughout their lives, and that’s ok. The very process of design means that your artefacts will evolve and grow, and if you’re any good as a designer you’ll be constantly refining and building on the insights you’ve uncovered. Remember that your artefacts are inputs, then take a big breath and make those changes. One of the hardest things to get used to can be this approach of getting your ideas out into the wild, open to critique and challenge. Get used to the fact that you’ll have to “kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart” (thanks, Stephen King).
7. Elevate your artefacts
Your artefacts exist for a higher purpose — creating a solution to a problem, meeting a need or evoking delight. At each step of the design process, think about where your artefact sits within the bigger picture and ask yourself if it’s helping you get closer to the end state. If there’s anything superficial, lazy or unnecessary within your artefacts, lose it. If you can’t see a clear link between your artefact and an outcome, change it. And if your artefact has just been sitting on your office wall for three months without a second glance, for goodness sake tear it down. Come on, you’re better than that.
