Designers, we can’t use the same tools to do our work and sell our work
After reading Lisa’s post about Undoing the Toxic Dogmatism of Digital Design I felt inspired to help. There’s a lot that needs to be undone.
One thread stood out that needed a strong pull: journey maps.
“We love making them. The storytelling potential of a well-constructed journey map is immense. It is a highly effective workshop facilitation tool. It produces a nice artifact for external communication afterward. But if I’m truly honest with you, in my gut, I know that the majority of them don’t help do more than tell the most surface-level story of limited user paths. And an inaccurate story at that.”
I remember chuckling. Nodding in agreement. Somehow, I also felt the need to defend journey maps. The mental clash was irritating.
I went and read an old blog post of mine with a similar vibe: Wireframes: A Good Communication Tool, a Poor Design Tool.
“A wireframe is good for gathering and consolidating the design thinking — the conversations and sketches — that has already occurred. Wireframes are good at opening up avenues of communication and spurring useful feedback. They can help you obtain someone’s approval, or move a project on to its next phase. Emails, contracts, and specifications also provide this kind of value. I like to call it paperwork.”
The key point above is that the design work has already occurred. The wireframe, for me, is writing up the report, so to speak. The report isn’t bad. Often useful and necessary. It’s that I’d rather include more people in the earlier steps where the real design work happens. Less reporting to external parties, more co-designing.
Also! Odds are, the higher fidelity versions that come after will include new lessons learned. Wireframes are always out of date (just like everything else).
Why do I have this love/hate relationship with wireframes? Why does this feel so familiar to journey maps? And personas? And prototypes? It’s important to build consensus, encourage feedback, and reduce risk.
Is it about shifting time of people’s involvement and their relationship to these tools? Is it more time educating and advocating? Or is it something else?
Several days passed. It began to dawn on me that almost every design tool at my disposal I both loved and hated. This kept nagging me. A few conversations later it untangled into something that made an awful lot of sense.
In short:
- We need to understand that each tool enables thinking and communicating.
- We need to distinguish whether we’re using the tool to do the design work or to sell the design work.
- We need to realize the detail and context for thinking and doing is unsuitable for communicating and selling — and vice versa.
I love interviewing people. It’s one of my favorite activities as a designer. After I’ve interviewed a few people and begin to see a pattern, I avoid trying to synthesize them into a single story. Instead, I share a story from Susan and say it was similar to Jeremiah and Alex. Susan seems to be the most representative of the pattern. In theory, her story could appeal to a large audience.
A real person. A real journey. A beginning, middle, and end. With friction and frustration. Time and effort spent despite friction and frustration suggest a purpose and desired outcome. A real problem.
This is high value work. Easy to theorize ways to respond. To later test the effectiveness of your response. It’s a journey map for thinking and working.
It scares people. It risks overcompensating towards a specific user. This is a fitting response. We should worry and take precaution. We shouldn’t take unnecessary risks.
If a person or their story isn’t representative enough, you find another. You keep looking. You keep interviewing. No single person will meet the needs of a large group. This is normal. Do your best.
Then, you accept that you can’t improve everything with one solution. There is no silver bullet. With each new interview you find another problem. Or three problems. Or ten problems. They’re similar, but can’t merge into a single problem without loosing essential detail.
Now you’re working on more specific, verifiable, testable problems. But there’s more of them. They’re smaller problems. Less “ambitious” problems.
People dislike this.
It’s hard to look at a dozen small problems and see a strategic thread. To feel confident and comfortable focusing on that work over other seemingly larger, more ambitious, goals.
So we synthesize. We find overarching themes. We merge stories.
We think, with good intent, that if we synthesize varying stories into a single story we’re helping. That we’re clarifying. We’re reducing risk. Meeting a larger audience’s needs.
We’re not. We’re loosing detail. We’re abandoning reality and building from imagination. As Lisa said, we’re reducing it to an inaccurate surface-level story. This is not helpful in doing design work.
But! But! But!
To stress another point Lisa made: the storytelling potential of a well-constructed journey map is immense.
We’re giving people a way to reason about the work. We’re giving them a scheme to compare value to other important work. To prioritize.
This is necessary. It’s absolutely necessary. When people give designers feedback about being better at sales, this is what they mean. Help people see the value we see.
Here’s where it all goes wrong.
Building one journey map to rule them all tricks us into thinking we’re growing and evolving. Becoming more influential, more important, and more valuable. It’s what our peers want us to do. It suggests the ultimate path of least resistance.
Solve the synthesized story problem.
You’ll be a hero!
Many designers would rather solve a “big” problem that doesn’t exist. We don’t want to deal with the infestation of “small” problems that seem beneath us.
We fall for it. Every time.
The synthesized story doesn’t exist. It’s not real. Solving it was never the point. Communicating value was it’s primary purpose. Opening avenues of communication. Getting someone’s approval.
Selling.
When it’s time to work, go back to the many small, but related, problems as your source material. Deal with one at a time until the diminishing returns cross a threshold; until it’s no longer valuable to solve more. Then, move on.
The real, simple, small stories are the work. The big, complex, synthesized story sells the work.
People’s problems don’t get bigger. Not really. Their goals get bigger. The mistake is matching one goal to one problem. A bigger goal is more problems. That’s all. More to understand and coordinate. More to prepare and plan.
In our quest to solve the “big” problem, we distort our tools and tactics for working and thinking. The problem we’re adapting out tools and tactics to solve doesn’t exist.
We’re using the same tools at the same fidelity to do the work and sell the work. That’s not effective. We need to stop.
Instead, we need to realize we’re designing for different audiences that need different artifacts. They have different goals. We have different goals. The same goes for wireframes, personas, prototypes, and everything else I use.
Isn’t that doubling our workload? Maybe. If you don’t like it, or the person that needs to be sold doesn’t like it, ask them to work with you. Not on an artifact in a workshop — the actual product. Do it together.
They may not be able to find time in their schedules, but they need to see and feel the consequences of splitting everyone’s time. Eventually, they might skip the workshop and join in on the fun!
Have a wonderful holiday! 🥰
