How to Make Communication Within the Design Cycle Life More Effective?

Overview

Usually, some people have a stereotype that designers only handle design-related issues. Partially! The everyday life of designers deals with various messy, indeterminate situations. Why? Let me explain. There are mainly three audiences, the design team, the users, and the organization, in the main early stages of the design life cycle: exploration, refinement, and transition. We could see that different audiences are distributed in various stages of the design cycle. We also could see that design is a process of social distribution. Communication plays a vital role in connecting these audiences to interact in the hustle design cycle of life. But only simple communication is not enough! We should apply catalysts to communication. If audiences could use them well, the design cycle life would be more smoothly and effectively. So, what’re the catalysts for communication in the design cycle life? — Stories and Prototypes.

Context

Before moving on to the magic catalyst research part, let me be more specific about the context of communication in the design cycle life.

Compositions of different audiences

There are different audiences in the design cycle life, and they are associated with the stages of the design cycle life. The actual audiences in the design depend on the product’s character. They are supposed to be designed, and the organization is associated with the product.

Usually, there are three groups of audiences: the design team, the users, and the organization.

• The users refer to the representative users or the target users.
• The design team usually is made up of people who come from different disciplines;
• The organization is these people who play a fundamental role in deciding if the product can be implemented, launched, and promoted, even though some of them do not participate in the design process.

Based on the three groups of audiences, we could divide three communication combinations happening in the design cycle life:

• Communication within a team
• Communication between users and the team
• Communication between the team and the organization

Stages in the early design cycle life

Like audiences, design cycle life is also decided by the product’s character, which is supposed to be designed, and the organization associated with the product. There are usually three stages of the design cycle: exploration, refinement, and transition. Among them, investigation and improvement could be belonged to the design process, which comprises the users and the team.

Usually, the communication catalysts of stories work in the stage of exploration and transition; the communication catalyst of the prototype plays its role in the refinement setting.

Diagram I summarizes the relationships between the stages of the early design cycle life, the typical activities and the corresponding audiences, and the related catalysts which work in specific scenes.

Stories

Let’s get started with the first communication catalyst, stories.

Firstly, we should make a difference between scenarios and stories. Usually, scenarios are more abstract and about the typical situation — they describe the usual steps of events. In contrast, stories are more concrete and about the atypical situation — they focus more on the users’ motivation, features, and level of detail and consider something about the edge cases.

Stories usually do their job in the stage of exploration and transition in the design cycle life. I will discuss the roles of stories’ works on three audiences in the steps of investigation and change separately.

The stage of exploration

In the exploration stage, there are three phases of stories: story gathering, story making, and storytelling.

The characteristics of the exploration stage are that the design team feels confused and uneasy because overwhelming things need to be defined, like who the users are, what the main problems are, etc. Another pain point in this stage is that a team of designers from different disciplines must interact with others. However, People often have information asymmetry, especially those who have different backgrounds and are new to each other.

Story gathering is a beautiful way of promoting team building. In the beginning, the team designers usually talk with many target users. In this process, the users gradually reveal their thoughts, emotion, motivation, needs, etc. Then, team members could sit around and swap the stories they heard. During the conversation, team members could open their minds and start considering something they had never considered and knew little before. That’s a process of diverging. After that, team members gradually converge on the main problems they should put priorities to deal with. Another benefit from story gathering — as the members share their stories, they slowly get to know each other and develop a shared language.

Story-making is an excellent way to reconstruct the original emotion and details of the users in events. That could help the designers empathize more with the needs of consumers, the functions the users need, and the considerate features. It’s an excellent way to get to know the mental model from the users.

During the storytelling phase, designers could create personas based on the target users to do storytelling. During the process, designers could get feedback, reflection, facial expression, and even signs (like “wow”) from the people who are hearing the stories as the metrics to double-check the users’ mental model for the following design.

The stage of transition

In this stage, stories are used more as the communication between the team and the organization. Stories can help design evangelism and transfer from the team to the organization. As design teams, one of the responsibilities is to defend the validity of their design from the recognition and support from PM, developers, consumers, and any associated with the organization where the design cycle takes place. It would be meaningless or frustrating if the product has been designed but cannot be launched or could not get enough support like funding or technology to maximize its effectiveness!

However, stories can do their job! An intriguing story with the level of detail from users can let people who lack context quickly get to know the design’s gist and the users’ actions and motivation. Stories are so helpful because they are incredibly memorable and informal.

Heads up

Another important point we should make is to go beyond the stories. How to understand it? Stories could be a suitable method of conveying information. Still, they do not represent that they are 100 percent accurate because sometimes the speaker has to be exaggerated some aspects to make sure the listeners can make sense.

To make stories more convincing, we could combine stories with quantitative and qualitative techniques to get a more comprehensive picture.

Prototypes

Here we are in the second catalyst of communication, prototypes.

Why are prototypes so important?

Defining problems is an essential part of the design process because it’s the breakthrough for guiding the design correctly. We could say defining the problem is the first step to letting designers know what essential functions the users want. But only defining the issues is not enough to create a good product because we have to realize — what a person says, what the person does, and what the person says, what they have done, actually are three different things. So, do not 100 percent believe in the words from the users’ mouths. Instead, let users try the prototypes and observe their reactions and what they express during the test. These expressions are more convincing than the words only born from the interviews without prototyping.

The types of prototypes

Prototypes play a vital role in the refinement stage of the design cycle life, and they focus on the to-be-designed product itself. There are mainly two prototypes: high fidelity (Hi-Fi) prototypes; low fidelity (Lo-Fi) prototypes. Hi-fi prototypes have their advantages users could be more intuitive knowing how to operate the interface because the appearance of Hi-Fi prototypes does look like the delicate final products. Instead, Lo-Fi prototypes look rough; however, the benefits of Lo-Fi products are beyond your imagination, especially the lo-fi paper prototype.

Paper prototypes and iteration

Remember the two important laws of design: “Know Your User” and “You Aren’t Your User.” That means we need to know our users by some techniques like the phrase of story gathering, but we never could completely understand what the users want. The only thing we could do was try to close and close over and over again, but never grab all in our hand, let alone grab once. An excellent way to get infinitely close to users’ mental models is by doing iteration of prototypes.

Paper lo-fi prototypes are an excellent time-consuming tool for the iterative process because it’s easy to learn and fast. More specifically, paper prototypes could quickly repeat the cycle of “from interviewing the users to redesign the prototype, and then from the redesign to be back the users” until the designers reach a consensus that there is nothing that needs to be improved and enter the next step. During the iterative process with paper prototypes, designers could gradually get a complete insight into the usability of the to-be-designed product and the formative evaluation. In contrast, let’s imagine a picture of the hi-fi prototypes. Imagine you were a designer and just finished with these brilliant-looking hi-fi prototypes with the selected colors, font, and images. I believe you have already fallen in love with the babies you made by contributing lots of time and energy. However, the research team suddenly stands before you and asks you to change somewhere. You would feel a minor annoyance if this situation repeats many times. I do believe you would be crazy! Because Hi-Fi prototypes in the software are hard to change and spend too much time. Another drawback of hi-fi prototypes is that designers quickly focus on good appearance when doing hi-fi prototypes instead of considering what the users need.

Paper prototypes facilitate communication.

Paper prototypes also could make communication between the design team and the communication between the design team and organization effective. The paper prototype could be seen as another round of storytelling about what the users want to let people who do not involve in the design process make sense of. Paper prototypes could facilitate brainstorming within a design team for team members. Hence, paper prototypes could be called work prototypes to facilitate the interaction because of the two properties: accessibility and roughness.