Learning to speak about actionable next steps is crucial to growing as a designer
Design communication is a soft skill that can drive progress
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.
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 may be.
However, we can’t present our teams with everything that a user said or did. Even if you could, most of the team would say, “So what?” So it’s up to us to translate what users said and did into something the team can understand: user wants, needs, and frustrations.
To show this, let’s take a look at three possible user insight statements:
3 out of 5 users failed to notice the checkout button in the top right (What users did)
Users expressed overall frustration with trying to checkout, often starting with searching for the checkout button (What users said)
We may need a partial re-design of the checkout process, as the majority of users are getting lost even with finding where to checkout (User research translation)
With the first statement, it’s easy to imagine our team saying, “So what?” especially if they come from a quantitative background. Five users are often insufficient for statistical significance, and the fact that three users ran into problems doesn’t tell them if this is a problem.
The second statement is slightly better because it shows many of the user's attitudes and emotions, but it also raises a large issue without attempting to resolve it: it’s not just the checkout button that’s the issue; it’s the whole checkout process.
Only the 3rd statement fully addresses everything, both what users said and did. This translation addresses the most common mistake many designers make when speaking to a team: they don’t provide actionable insights.
Designers often fail to translate actionable insights or next steps
Most of the details you provide to the rest of the team don’t matter as much as talking about the next step.
While it can be useful for your team to understand the user’s perspective and empathize with them, it’s often more important to communicate what you want the team to do next.
In the statement above, while we bring up what the user said and did, what’s most important is that we talk about the next step: we need to consider re-designing the checkout process.
This is not a decision just up to the designer: the Product team has to plan for design (and development improvements) and consider whether a full re-design is necessary or we can do a partial re-design. In other words, they’re actions that the team should consider based on this user research.
This is the most important thing to bring up, and it’s not just limited to user research. With a user research presentation, there are two additional questions (in addition to usability issues) you must address to properly drive action:
For each usability problem, what are your recommendations for resolution?
Among all identified usability concerns, which should be prioritized?
Addressing the first question typically involves structured slide presentations:
Background: What context is essential for understanding where or when users encounter this issue?
Issue: A detailed description of the problem, the number of affected users, and its significance (using what users said and did).
Recommendations: Proposed design solutions to address the usability concern.
To answer the second question, you might categorize usability issues into broader themes. For instance, if users consistently grapple with dropdown menus across various pages, it indicates that the overall dropdown menu design is problematic.
It may seem I’m suggesting a premature dive into the next design phase immediately after user research. By offering these recommendations, one might think we’re prematurely designing the next iteration of the application. However, that’s not my goal: I aim to prepare you for an inevitable team question: “So, what’s our next step?”
As the Subject Matter Expert (SME) on user experience, you should guide your team around what actions to take and prioritize around usability. If you can’t, not only will that reflect negatively on you. It might compel your team to make hasty decisions based on fresh information, which is hardly ideal.
However, your suggestions don’t always have to involve design recommendations. The next step is sometimes scheduling a meeting with a Lead Engineer (or other people) to discuss certain options or more specifics around the issue.
In either case, keeping this “Actionable Insights” mindset is crucial to many meetings you attend, and it can extend far beyond user research.
Use actionable insights thinking to clarify complex concepts
Once you start adopting an actionable insights mindset around user research, you may find it helpful in many of the daily meetings you attend.
This is because Designers have a superpower that many other team members don’t: visualization.
We often take a list of requirements from the Product team and turn it into something visual like a mockup regularly. To do that, we have to have some image of what that would look like in our heads.
Some of us even practice doing this quickly and regularly, through sketching.
So if you find yourself in meetings trying to build around a complex concept, having that actionable insights mindset can bring clarity to the rest of the team.
All you need to do is ask yourself one question: If the next step is to be a sketch from me, how would I do this?
This is where active listening is crucial. As they discuss a complex concept, you should again focus on that ‘next step’: doing more user research or scheduling a meeting. Figuring out what needs to be done, and creating it visually, can be crucial in ensuring that your team can move forward with a shared understanding.
Sometimes the next step is that design mockup or prototype, but oftentimes it’s yet another meeting to discuss and explain a particular concept. If, instead, you can share a sketch and try to get some feedback on whether this is capturing a complex concept, your team will appreciate the effort.
This skill can help others’ understanding and is a way to justify your seat at the decision-making table.
Design communication is often what gets you a seat at the table
Elevating my design communication skills has been pivotal in my growth as a designer, enabling me to contribute more significantly to the team.
Whether it’s providing actionable next steps to user research or visualizing complex concepts that the rest of the team needs to grasp, it’s been a crucial part of becoming a Senior Product Designer, and it’s often gotten me into meetings where I was able to make a difference.
The end of any meeting should be rooted in a clear next step, but it’s often harder to get there than you may realize. That’s why offering these tools to the rest of the team and grounding your process with actionable insights helps improve your design process and can help you champion user wants and needs more effectively.
So the next time you encounter an uncomfortable silence, or a team that doesn’t seem to fully realize the scope or severity of the problem, consider one question: what should they do next?
Answering that question can help determine what actions you need to take to move forward.
Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer, Data-Informed Design Author, and Top Design Writer on Medium. His new free book, The Resilient UX Professional, provides real-world advice to get your first UX job and advance your UX career.
I enjoy your newsletters, and I always learn something. Thank you!
A thought. You mention "what users did" and "what users said". May I suggest that you add "what users felt"? Rigorous application of empathy is core to UX practice, and is something that we are uniquely qualified to bring to the table.