How to start designing when you can't understand the words being used
How to begin your design process when working on complex projects
Photo by John Barkiple on Unsplash
“To reduce clinical variation in orders, we developed an evidence-based care process model using predictive modeling to improve treatment at the point of care.”
Those were the first words I read in a project, and I understood nothing about them. It wasn’t the first time, either.
My Design background has almost always been about working with complex subjects, from Healthcare and Health tech to Federal organizations and older adults. As a result, at the start of each project, I’ve gotten used to being barraged by terminology I can’t understand.
You might have encountered that as well. You start a project, and you’re given a stack of documents and some old prototypes that you can’t make sense of. What’s a ‘representative payee’ or ‘ceftriaxone’? Here’s the truth, coming from a Senior UX Designer: the terminology doesn’t matter at the start. If it’s confusing to you, ignore it and ask questions later.
You are a designer, not an amateur “X”
When I started designing, I would try to learn everything possible about the project I was working on. In some sense, I was looking to become an amateur in whatever subject matter I was working with. For example, if I was working on a healthcare application for medicine, I wanted to become an ‘amateur’ doctor to understand every detail of the application.
But that’s a silly approach. Becoming an amateur doctor didn’t help the design and often wasted a lot of time.
Imagine you only had three weeks to re-design a healthcare application. Is it more beneficial to:
Understand every term used in the application to a doctor’s proficiency?
Understand the terms just enough to find and fix significant usability issues?
You rarely have the resources to do both. In that case, understanding just enough, in broad terms, helps you figure out your core responsibilities: what’s wrong, where are users running into issues, and how to better design something for them.
To explain further, let me give two examples:
“The user clicked on xxxxx instead of yyyyy, which took him to the next screen. He didn’t realize that until after he had submitted his order.”
or
“The user chose Gentamicin instead of Ceftriaxone while filling out the standard order form. He explained he would make this variation to his order because of A, B, and C.”
Which of these statements allows you to design something better? It’s the first statement. There are design issues we can fix, even with our limited understanding: they didn’t notice that they made an error until it was too late. The second statement is interesting but hard to incorporate into our design.
In that case, what can help you if you’re getting confused with the terminology, is to ignore it and write it down for later. It’s more important to understand the broad strokes, like where they’re running into issues, to understand what your designer goals should be.
So how do you get started? By keeping these things in mind.
Find what doesn’t make sense when you blank out the terminology
When you start a project, it can help you blank out the terminology to help you look for specific user behavior patterns. These patterns can be improved through UX Design, no matter the context.
User personas are one of the first ways to consider this. After going through whatever documentation you have, try to form an “ad-hoc” (i.e., an informed guess) persona of your user and what they’re trying to accomplish in broad terms. Blank sections are okay because you’ll be asking for feedback later on.
Source: https://pouriamousavi.medium.com/ad-hoc-persona-what-and-how-831f782d3244
This is necessary because one primary pattern for improvement is user workflow. Ask for a walkthrough (or review user footage) and keep track of a person's steps to complete something. If something makes little sense, explore it as a UX opportunity. Here are some examples I’ve encountered:
A user navigates to an outside application or page in the middle of their workflow (i.e., checking the serial number of a device and then going back to type it in)
A user can’t see anything useful until the administrator approves access, resulting in a natural bottleneck.
The user has to train themselves not to hit the web browser’s “Back button”. Otherwise, they need to close and open the specific case again.
When a user starts with the wrong filters, no results are found.
Users have to complete a multi-page process when a line of customers is standing in front of them.
You may have ideas on improving these workflows upon hearing these, even without knowing the terminology. You’re bringing a fresh set of eyes and a new person’s perspective, allowing you to push for significant changes. You’ll need to figure out the terminology, but that’s a lot easier when you’ve filled in many significant blanks. This allows you to ask people specific questions, which are easier to answer.
Ask people when you have specific questions
It would be best if you always asked your team members for their input and guidance. However, I’ve often found that waiting for your team members to respond regarding a project’s basics can become a bottleneck.
Found this out when I started a project in December. Between the holidays and team members taking a vacation before the end of the year, it was rare to have the entire team available to take questions, gather feedback, and make decisions. So I needed to learn as much as possible before things started rolling in January.
I did that by trying to understand everything but the terminology: how do people work, where are the pain points, and how can UX help. Doing so allowed me to ask specific questions about the terminology around things I didn’t understand, which were much more manageable for team members to address.
Rather than explaining what a term is in its entire history, if something makes little sense in the workflow, then it’s easier for your team members to answer.
So the next time you’re faced with terms that just seemed foreign to you, relax. Don’t pay attention to the terms: pay attention to the user, workflow, and the things that make little sense. That will help you get started a lot quicker.