Visual Communication Questions
Source: http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?197
Q: Do you have any advice on how I can communicate the design decisions I’ve made to stakeholders who all seem to have an opinion about my designs? How can I convince people this is the right design solution?
A: From my experience there are only two things you need to do. Understand both the business and user goals of the application. Then use the language of design to explain how you are meeting those goals.
Taking the time up front to really research and understand end users and business needs enables you to speak directly to consumer expectations and stakeholder objectives. You need to know what your design is trying to accomplish: who is it for? What does it do? And why does it matter?
You can then explain how you’ve applied the principles of perception and visual communication to achieve those goals. For example “Our research has shown that this information is what most users are looking for on this page. As a result, it has the most visual weight (achieved through a strong contrast with the background) on this screen.” Outlining how visual design decisions enforce the relationships between content and guide user actions tends to remove the subjectivity inherent in many design reviews.
Q: How do I know if I have the right visual hierarchy in my designs? Do I need to test it?
A: As Jim Leftwich has pointed out: “It is very definitely possible to perceive and extrapolate user needs and develop successful interfaces without extensive user research, if one is adept at understanding generalized patterns.” This applies to visual communication as well. Understanding the foundational principles behind visual design enables you create effective designs without extensive testing.
That said, there is “no such thing as a bad usability test” -you can always learn something. As a result, testing a visual design can yield some valuable insights. However, there are a few guidelines for getting the right data from these types of tests. Asking users “do you like option a or option b?” rarely provides any useful information. Consider instead asking users to provide a few adjectives they’d use to describe the design or ask them to walk through a specific task. This process will help inform whether or not the visual design is effectively supporting user needs.
Q: Do you have any advice on how I can communicate the design decisions I’ve made to stakeholders who all seem to have an opinion about my designs? How can I convince people this is the right design solution?
A: From my experience there are only two things you need to do. Understand both the business and user goals of the application. Then use the language of design to explain how you are meeting those goals.
Taking the time up front to really research and understand end users and business needs enables you to speak directly to consumer expectations and stakeholder objectives. You need to know what your design is trying to accomplish: who is it for? What does it do? And why does it matter?
You can then explain how you’ve applied the principles of perception and visual communication to achieve those goals. For example “Our research has shown that this information is what most users are looking for on this page. As a result, it has the most visual weight (achieved through a strong contrast with the background) on this screen.” Outlining how visual design decisions enforce the relationships between content and guide user actions tends to remove the subjectivity inherent in many design reviews.
Q: How do I know if I have the right visual hierarchy in my designs? Do I need to test it?
A: As Jim Leftwich has pointed out: “It is very definitely possible to perceive and extrapolate user needs and develop successful interfaces without extensive user research, if one is adept at understanding generalized patterns.” This applies to visual communication as well. Understanding the foundational principles behind visual design enables you create effective designs without extensive testing.
That said, there is “no such thing as a bad usability test” -you can always learn something. As a result, testing a visual design can yield some valuable insights. However, there are a few guidelines for getting the right data from these types of tests. Asking users “do you like option a or option b?” rarely provides any useful information. Consider instead asking users to provide a few adjectives they’d use to describe the design or ask them to walk through a specific task. This process will help inform whether or not the visual design is effectively supporting user needs.
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1:13 PM
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