Photo by Ricky Esquivel: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-in-purple-cardigan-using-binoculars-1720080/

Design communication, especially around actionable insights, is one of those soft skills that has become important to advancing my design career.

I never noticed its impact until I started to be invited to very high-level meetings. I wasn’t invited solely because of this skill, but everyone listened when I spoke to wrap up actionable insights.

One of the most common but unspoken questions at the end of any meeting is a simple one: “What’s the next step?” Whether you’re presenting user research findings or helping to assess an engineering change’s impact on design, it’s often one of the lingering questions at the end of every meeting to identify what happens after this meeting.

While this should often fall to Product Managers, learning to do this for meetings centered around design can be especially critical to help your team understand what happens next.

Not to mention, Designers are often equipped to do this because we act as translators for our business and users.

Designers are often translators, whether you realize it or not

When you discuss design with your team, you often step beyond the traditional role of a designer and become a translator.

We do this because of the qualitative nature of our field, particularly with user research. As designers, we often deal with attitudinal insights, what users say, and behavioral observations, or what users do.

While we can pose questions through interviews or surveys, we can’t always trust what the users say to be 100% true. This isn’t because they lie: it’s far more likely that it’s hard to define what they want and need without a visual.

https://medium.com/learn-ium/what-steve-jobs-taught-me-about-customer-feedback-8f7e982505a6

This is why we also monitor user behavior as they navigate our applications and complete tasks. We see how they react to our design and test out how effective that solution…