The quality of our discussions

One of my design mentors, K.C. Teis, told me one day: “The quality of the design depends on the quality of the discussions that the designers have”.

Like for any true word of wisdom, I didn’t understand immediately how important that statement was. Over time though, I slowly became obsessed by the conversations that designers were having. Every time I would come across someone who would produce great work, I was looking for ways to discover what daily chats were behind it.

Lately, I was wondering how we, as UX team, reach the next level. That’s when I remembered K.C.’s piece of advice. So this week, I paid attention to the discussions we were having at BlaBlaCar, when talking about design. In particular, I focused on the questions that were being asked. And this is what I heard:

• What detail are you most proud of?
• How would LEGO tackle that ?
• Why don’t you believe in remote user testing?
• How do you create a trust in a community?
• What is the real problem you’re trying to solve?
• Did you reuse any existing components?
• What is the right KPI to measure user satisfaction?
• What other solutions did you explore?
• Is there a simpler alternative?
• Should we call this a modal or a pop-in?
• What is the 10-year vision of that platform?
• Why is this icon green?
• What persona are you designing this screen for?
• Is that a realistic scenario?
• What is the iOS equivalent is this Android pattern?
• Did you read that depressing about artificial intelligence?
• What are you presenting at tomorrow’s design review?
• What are you preparing for the BlaBlaShow?
• What other ideas did you come up with?
• Who is going to the Lean UX meetup next week?
• What book would be a nice welcome gift for our new team member?
• Would card sorting help answer that question?
• What did you discover while working on this project?
• Who did you benchmark before coming up with this solution?
• Is “unpain” a real word?
• How many tables were booked at today’s BlaBlaLunch?
• What were you trying to accomplish?

I don’t know what those questions are telling about ourselves. If you’re seeing a pattern, please let us know. And if you’d like to participate to those discussions, well, we’re hiring.