Talking the talk, in any field

**Please note, this article is part of an assignment for User-Centered Design (IDS 401). My commentary does not necessarily reflect the views of my company or my university.**

The Information Design & Strategy master's program at Northwestern has a fun and interesting curriculum that I have come to appreciate greatly over the past 2 years. Main concepts tends to overlap across courses. I love that cross-functional model because it not only reinforces my learning but helps me work with people of diverse professional backgrounds. It really is a great program for anyone in any field, as long as you are willing to be afraid to fail but not put too much pressure on yourself. You only have to be willing to read, listen, discuss, and get a little creative! Students do have the option to specialize in one of four areas, but I chose "interdisciplinary" because I'm too interested in too many things to have chosen one path. However, now after 5 years post-undergrad and 10 courses in grad school, I do know what continues to excite me.

I hope to use my degree to consult companies on their employee engagement and training processes. A good way to describe this is User Researcher + Change Manager + Culture Coordinator. With the employees as the "users", I would conduct research on what is going well and what needs to improve, work across departments to enact change, and then plan events and create templates to help enhance company culture. Well, this sounds like a whole lot in one job, doesn't it? I'd love to find a way to do this at my current company and to consult for other companies, too, but that is not my focus at the moment.

My focus is to hone the skills and understand the content I am encountering in the IDS program. Then I can observe and listen to what different companies are doing, from my own to my friends to my classmates. While it may seem obvious that listening is such an important communication skill, we really don't do it as much as we should. The better we listen, however, the better we can understand the languages across different departments, companies, and fields.

Today, I finished my second-to-last quarter of grad school. While I mostly feel tired from finals and distracted by the summer sun, I also feel very proud of myself. And I get to enjoy these feelings of pride and gratitude because I am actually spending time reflecting on the quarter. In other programs, what seems like a silly reflection or busy work is actually an extremely useful tool for me in IDS. We apply our skills in writing, critical thinking, and research, while also having "forced" time to reflect on what we learned from class content, our team members, and our professors. I love how this program gives us opportunities to explore all sectors of this field while also motivating us to figure out what we actually want to do with the learnings.

This quarter, I took two of my favorite classes so far: User-Centered Design and Effective Communication. When I paired these two courses together, I didn't think much about the overlapping content, other than getting better at writing and presenting (in Comms class) to help me work well with my team and create better deliverables (in UCD). Now that I am reflecting on a prompt from my UCD professor, I've had an a-ha moment about how great communication makes for great design.

Here's the prompt: A good practitioner of UCD works to be able to speak the language of different parties: visual design, interaction design, development and programming, sound, video, motion, business and more.

What areas do you feel confident communicating within? Or least confidence? & how might you address the lower confidence areas?

Being able to speak the language of various departments has been a major part of every role I’ve held. This became so apparent to me at the end of undergrad that I wrote a blog post about it, so I’m thrilled these important skills are recognized. Liaison work and code switching between departmental languages are two skills that are useful in any field. The IDEO authors mention the importance of stakeholders throughout their human-centered design field guide, and they are not alone (IDEO.org). Now that I have learned about HCD and UCD, it seems wasteful to neglect the value of communicating with stakeholders and potential users. This communication is stronger when we empathically use words they will understand and frame ideas in relatable context. This process also helps identify the correct problems for which we are solving and the signifiers that will actually make sense to users (Norman, p. 8, 40).

Before we get to the designing though, we have to communicate with our internal teammates. Regarding user-centered design work, there are three areas where I feel most comfortable with the language: visual design, writing, and video. These disciplines were the most prevalent in my journalism classes in undergrad as well as during my 3+ years working at an advertising agency. As a project manager, my core responsibility was to be a liaison between designers, writers, client managers, and producers. In any business field, especially advertising, a great use case for speaking the language of multiple parties is presenting a pitch deck. As the leaders at Style Scape remind us in their “Pitch This!” video, “the person on the other end of this conversation is not a designer. They may have creative tendencies and care about design" but they are not inherently as skilled at design as the creative team members pitching the work (The Futur).

A useful method for making pitches more engaging and digestible is to “take something people do not know and attach it to something they do know”, which creates a shared visual language between all parties (The Futur). If I used this technique in UCD, I could equate prototyping an app to building with Legos. Let’s imagine my building project is to create a tree house in my backyard. I do not immediately start building the tree house with lumber and nails. I might sketch the design and build a prototype. If I used Legos, it may take me a few tries to assemble the shape and style I want. Even after that, I’d like to share the design with at least one other person so I can determine if my idea makes sense to other users and might be functional outside in real use. I would use their feedback and my own reactions to design again before using any physical construction tools. The same process applies to building an app: sketching, testing, collecting feedback, and trying again. Then I can put screens into computer software to make a clickable experience.

The more difficult fields for me to speak about are programming, business, and data analytics. While I have learned basics of all three areas, I would still need to rely on subject-matter experts to make my learning process smoother, which would allow me to move forward in the UCD process. I would also do my own research on past company projects and industry knowledge to better inform myself.

In my Content Strategy course, we also discussed cross-functional communication, and the value became clearer the more I learned about UCD. “Just as research is most robust with qualitative and quantitative data, business projects are most efficient with a mix of individual and group thinking. Being purposeful in the way we use language and frame ideas is essential to allowing developers, and eventually consumers or audiences, to understand the meaning” (Budelmann). One of the principles of UCD is to use simple dialogue. How can we expect to build systems and products that have simple dialogue if we cannot even translate vocabulary to each other while working across departments?

Throughout my teenage and adult years, I have worked in industries such as outdoor recreation, event planning, advertising, and industrial supply chain. While those industries each have their own vocabulary, I know the companies in each industry and their internal departments all have job-specific language too. Not knowing certain lingo can make people feel isolated or belittled, so I strive to be a team member who helps people understand essential language instead of believing that everyone must know lingo immediately. This is one of my methods of being inclusive and sharing implicit knowledge to iterate on ideas and learn alongside others.

Encouraging people to always feel empowered to ask questions is a great path to doing your best work, and to sharing and collecting feedback to improve. The more honest and clear we are, the more opportunity we have to understand our goals and feel motivated to work toward them. In high-stakes jobs, asking questions and using clear, shared language is also absolutely vital to safety. From "The Five Messages Leaders Must Manage" HBR article, this section stood out to me.

By contrast, think of the way a high-reliability team—say, an emergency room staff or a SWAT team—works. Every member has a precise understanding of what things mean. Surgeons and nurses speak the same medical language. SWAT teams know exactly what weapons to use, and when and how and under what conditions to use them. In these professions, there is absolutely no room for sloppy communication. If team members don’t speak to each other with precision, people die. People don’t die in corporations, but without clear definitions and directions from the top, they work ineffectively and at cross-purposes.

As I've learned from my coworkers and classmates, most of our jobs are not as high stakes as those in the medical or military fields. However, this is a good lesson in using shared, simple language and avoiding vague goals or buzzwords.

As I improve my communication skills, I will keep in mind how departmental language can include or exclude people. When people feel "out of the loop, they become disengaged" (Close Blog). Of course, there are the more intensive jobs I mentioned that require prior deep knowledge of certain vocabulary. In general though, we don't always want to speak in slang, acronyms, or buzzwords because it can be unclear and uncomfortable.

While I work toward a job where I can be a researcher, change manager, and culture coordinator, I need to analyze how I can use language + the principles of UCD to connect with people and connect people to each other. Anyone can be a good communicator if you prioritize listening. Good communication skills inform good design. However, those two simple sentences do not justice for how complicated communicating and designing can be. Doing it right means spending time researching, testing, talking, and listening. I am grateful to be studying in a program that allows- and encourages- time for all of that.

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References

Budelmann, Kevin. Week 5 Class Lecture Notes. IDS 407: Information & Content Strategy. Canvas Notes.

“How to Communicate Apart While Working Remotely.” The Close Sales Blog, 31 Mar. 2020, blog.close.com/communicating-apart/. Accessed 26 Aug. 2022.

IDEO.org. The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design. 2011. 1st ed., San Francisco, California, Design Kit, 2015.

Norman, Donald A. The Design of Everyday Things. 1988. 2nd ed., Massachusetts, Mit Press, 2013.

"The Five Messages Leaders Must Manage" John Hamm. in Harvard Business Review. (2013.)?HBR's 10 Must Reads on Communication?. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press. p. 145.

The Futur. “Pitch This! How to Present Design Work to Clients like a Pro!” Www.youtube.com, 8 Oct. 2017, youtu.be/rOGAJwm3n_M. Accessed 22 Aug. 2022.