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Why language is the most crucial part of any design process

 3 years ago
source link: https://uxdesign.cc/why-language-is-the-most-crucial-part-of-any-design-process-37882a7d4c93
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Why language is the most crucial part of any design process

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

Brace yourself. We are going to cover a lot of ground in a very short time. Design is the rationale-driven process of creating something to serve a specific purpose. That purpose can be anything — it can be to be functional, decorative, eye-catching, hard to notice, amusing, provoking, cheap to produce, easy to ship, impossible to pick up, etcetera. Regardless of what it is, the purpose is always clear before the design process starts. Design is, therefore, not art. Moreover, the quality of a design can, contrary to popular belief, be measured and quantified. The better a design serves its predefined purpose, the better the design itself is. This quality can be expressed on a scale from 0 to 1 (or 0 to a million if you want to be fancy).

Without a clearly defined purpose, you cannot design effectively: you cannot make rational choices to achieve an outcome if the outcome is vague, let alone undefined. This means that, to design as intentionally as possible, we need a way to express, store, and transport the desired outcome as well as we can. This method of expression needs to be low-maintenance, easy to interpret by as many stakeholders as required, easy to transmit and receive, and as cheap as possible to make adjustments to, back and forth.

You’ve guessed it. The single most efficient carrier of meaning in this sense is unformatted digital text. The unformatted part here is crucial. Formatting options open the door to interpretation. Adding color, layout, or images to text beats the purpose. Plain text, optionally structured through markdown, is undeniably the way to go. Failure to recognize this deceptively simple fact will harm every single design process you participate in because it prevents you from clearly stating and communicating the purpose of your design.

Plain text is how requirements, expectations, and substantiation of your work are transmitted. Without clear requirements, without knowing and managing expectations, and without the ability to substantiate your work, you are in the dark — no matter how brilliant you are.

“I can start calculating how much time it will work. Or I can just begin, that will save more time.”

— Jules (my dyslexic best friend and co-founder of our agency) in response to a client asking for a quote, 2010

Hello, language

The pivotal role of text poses a harsh reality for the many creators who struggle with language. Nevertheless, the worst thing you can do is to shy away from the truth. Given a choice between badly written, hard-to-read requirements and substantiations, or none at all, the former is obviously the way to go.

Besides: people hire you to do design work. Not to write a novel about it. If you can solve their problems through design by first articulating the requirements (albeit slowly and ridden with errors) but deliver on time and on budget, you are serving them well, and you will stay in business.

A better idea, however, may be to team up with someone adept in writing. Because, apart from plain text as a carrier of requirements and substantiation, many designs need language in other places, too.

Free tip at the end: pick up the phone more often. If you struggle to put things to writing, try anyway, but after sending whatever you needed to send, call the recipient and verbally explain yourself in more detail. You got this.

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why-language-is-the-most-crucial-part-of-any-design-process-37882a7d4c93
The UX Collective donates US$1 for each article we publish. This story contributed to World-Class Designer School: a college-level, tuition-free design school focused on preparing young and talented African designers for the local and international digital product market. Build the design community you believe in.

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