Lots of you designers talk in tongues. Here’s a list to help do it more.

1. When asked about a section on your website, state that the ‘EXTRANEOUS COGNITIVE LOAD’ is too much for the average user.

If you’re a designer the phrase ‘cognitive load’ seems to be something that you need to say. It is good to get it into sentences when there is too much shit on the page and too much to take on for the reader.

2. When being asked about why something hasn't been designed right, mention that it’s just not ‘CUSTOMER-CENTRIC’ enough to make sense.

Gartner tells us that:

‘Customer centricity is the ability of people in an organization to understand customers’ situations, perceptions, and expectations. Customer centricity demands that the customer is the focal point of all decisions related to delivering products, services and experiences to create customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.’

A lot of bloody words to say ‘designed for the customer, while knowing and thinking about the customer’. That’s it. Get it in a sentence or two, it holds weight.

3. You telling your colleagues that all designs were done with ‘DESIGN- THINKING’ (of course)

This one is a cracker. Its kind of like the marketing is done with ‘marketing thinking,’ the engineering being done with ‘engineering-thinking.’

You get the point. For some reason, these two words carry lots of weight and seem very believable as if to be some secret magic. Absolute nonsense, but works wonders.

4. When talking about your designs, explain that you’re working hard to make sure everything’s ‘ORTHOGONAL’

It sounds like you’re doing all you can to make sure the website is killer. No one knows what orthogonal means. If asked, just say it’s all about the site balance, which is crucial for a good experience.

5. If a colleague asks about some of the design work happening, mention that there needs to be more ‘CROSS-POLLINATION’ in the team.

This touches on the fact that you’re a team player who knows that you need to band together to go far. Everyone’s a bloody designer, right!

You need to cross-pollinate and get ideas from everywhere. And of course one of the best ways to do this is with good old design thinking!

6. Talk about ‘FRAMEWORKS’ that you love

You’ll sound like a big picture designer talking about bringing in a framework. ‘A new way of working’ of how you think the team should move forward.

Throw it in that you wouldn’t build a home without a structure, and the same goes for the experience. Nice.

7. When in a meeting about a release, pipe up and holler ‘JUST SHIP IT ALREADY’

This plays to your ‘let’s not mess around and get on with it’ attitude. Speed is of the essence and you don’t want any part in dilly-dallying around to release the new feature.

8. While discussing the email marketing campaign stress that a quality ‘PRE-HEADING’ can make or break the campaign.

Omnisend gives us a top explanation of a pre-header:

‘Sometimes called email preview text, a preheader is that muted text shaded grey, that appears immediately after the subject line.’

Most people don’t know this. You do. Speak up and state that you’ve done lots of UX writing study in the past and this stuff is SUPER important.

9. While talking about your design system mention that the real problem with it right now is the ‘HYSTERESIS’ with the system.

The collins dictionary tells us that hysteresis means:

‘A lag between input and output in a system upon a change in direction. Hysteresis is something that happens with magnetic materials so that, if a varying magnetizing signal is applied, the resulting magnetism that is created follows the applied signal, but with a delay.’

Enough said, try it out.

10. Talking about the company’s current website mention that as the designer you really need to do a ‘HEURISTIC EVALUATION’ of the site before you do anything else.

Nielson and Norman give is good write up on this:

‘Heuristic evaluation is a usability engineering method for finding the usability problems in a user interface design so that they can be attended to as part of an iterative design process. Heuristic evaluation involves having a small set of evaluators examine the interface and judge its compliance with recognized usability principles (the “heuristics”).’

How many times have us designers heard of people talking about a heuristic evaluation of this and that? It’s a thing. Use it.