Don’t be afraid to make stuff up

A piece of advice I’ve never seen given to designers

When you live in a world of best practices and you’re learning and growing, you look up to the design leaders and use the great tools and processes they tell us about in workshops and talks.

Which is great!

Personas, content audits, journey maps, etc. — there’s all sorts of good templates and knowledge out there and I am 100% for not re-inventing wheels. It’s awesome that so many are kind enough to put what they’ve done out there for others to use.

Sometimes, you need something different

I have been making sitemaps for ages. But I was consistently frustrated that in my presentation of sitemaps, we couldn’t get anywhere in the discussion because the sitemap misses so much — it can’t tell you which page is linking to what, it doesn’t tell you what pieces of content are represented on each page, which is really important when you’re trying to decide on the information architecture of your website!

So I made something up. I made a hybrid sitemap/content strategy document, which you can read more about here. I had been a full-time designer for less than a year at the time. Looking back, I can’t believe I was allowed to present that to our client — it wasn’t a tool we used, it wasn’t a template, and no other designer I knew of had ever used such a thing.

But it worked

I had one of the best information architecture/content strategy discussions with a client ever.

I learned something important. After all — those templates, processes, cool diagrams, they were made by another human, just like you — there’s not some Design God making the holy grail of diagrams that everyone must use — it’s another human that made something up because it helped them.

So if you’re finding yourself where what you’re using just isn’t communicating what you’re trying to say, make something up.

Did this help you?

You can contribute to my book fund so that I can keep learning & writing!

Ashley Crutcher is now the Director of Experience Strategy at InterVarsity located in Madison, WI. She tweets at @ashleyspixels and enjoys cuddling with her furkiddos, crocheting/knitting, ringing handbells, and thinking too much about everything.