Terminology across industries

I was approached the other day with a request to create a graphic to help explain terminology from an IT firm. They were having an issue where their clients weren't understanding the questions being asked, particularly around what sort of networking was already in place.

The idea

Create a perspective illustration of the client's office which would include the all the elements on the glossary of terms and label them to help the client understand the terminology.

The real question

Immediately I stopped this person and asked him if he had asked the client what they would call each item. Judging from the vacant stare I could tell he was thinking I had no clue what I was talking about and he said their terminology varied across the clients.

The problem

The problem that he didn't see was that no diagram, graphic, cartoon or anything he could provide would change the terminology being used by the client. A graphic with bad labels won't help them understand any better than you explaining it to them.

The Solution

Ignoring his protest that each client uses different terms, I suggested that he talk to at least 5 different clients and find out the most common terms being used in their industry and adjust the terminology of his document to match.

The outcome

Unfortunately the outcome was that he decided to create the graphic on his own, I only hope those poor souls in the client's office will be kind when he presents them with a graphic that makes absolutely no sense to them.

The Mom Test

When I first started out I was designing interactive pieces for the news and they would be seen by millions of viewers in a matter of hours. The pressure was on so it started to became important that we test things out to make sure people understood how to use the interface. We'd share links around the office and exchange comments but there there was one sure way I could test my designs...

The Mom Test

Of course your mom will never say anything bad about your design but it's not so much what she says, it's what she does with the design. If mom could do it then anyone could and her 800 x 600px monitor on her PC was how the world would see things.

This test is still relevant today as I share designs and look for users to test them I will often go to mom. So here's to moms everywhere.

Thanks Mom!

Related

We know what users need

A couple of years ago I had the privilege of working for a large and well know media organization with decades of history. A true story...

There was a creative director who had spent most of his career in print design and was used to being the smartest person in the room. One day I was watching him use one of the designers as voice-activated Photoshop. "Take this and move it over there", he said. "Yeah, that's better but make that font bigger. Oh and see if you can lighten up the shade of that blue, it doesn't stand out enough." I could swear that this designer had a soul once, but now it seemed to be sucked out of his body. This man not only dictated his designs he was unashamedly opinionated on how the design should function.

At this point I offered a suggestion about the design and how the user might interact with a particular piece. To my astonishment the man stopped talking, turned to me and said...

" I think we know a lot better what people need than they do."

Unfortunately this attitude was reflected across the organization and was so widely accepted that anyone trying to promote user research was stifled. About a year later this same man was asked to resign due to his inability to progress and keep up with the ever-changing market. But his legacy was in place and it would be several years and reorganizations before real change occurred. Meanwhile this organization was left in the dust by competitors.

I'm a developer, not a designer... I think?

As children we were all artists. Nobody could tell us that our pictures weren't right or good, and everything we did came from the belief that we could draw anything. And we could draw anything because there was nothing holding us back. We weren't hung up on technique, shadows, realism or scale. If we thought about a pony, we drew a pony and it was the best pony we'd ever seen. Some never lose that ability but for the rest, somewhere along the path of life, we forget that creativity once poured out of us.

I didn't set out to be a designer, it just sort of happened. Right as the newspaper industry was moving online I was in school to become a photojournalist. As we focused on the web experience I found myself putting photos together with audio to create slideshows. We did so many that we started stringing these slideshows together under a shared interface. And a strange thing happened, all of a sudden I had to start thinking about interfaces, what it would look like and how the content would be organized into something that made sense. Overnight I became a designer.

I was dropped into a world of information architecture, interaction flow charts and wireframes. I would create those initial designs then hand them off to a "designer" to be made pretty and I would get to work building the interface.

I did all sorts of design and didn't hold back because I could always rely on the person with design in their title to complete things. My awkwardly sketched designs were focused on the interaction and I was able to flourish because nobody expected me to give them something gorgeous, just functional. I was like a child because I didn't have any pressure to make something perfect.

The most interesting thing about all of this is that I considered myself to be a developer because I wrote the code. It wasn't until years later that I admitted to myself that I am indeed a designer and have been all along. And here's the pony to prove it.