Summary: Clear communication is the first step on the road to great design and often the most overlooked…
Short Circuit the Telephone Game.
Did you ever play the game of telephone when you were a kid? This is a group game in which one person starts by whispering a phrase or sentence to someone and each successive participant in a circle secretly passes the communication on to the next, until it goes all the way around and is finally revealed to the person who initially started the chain. The message will have mutated dramatically and the joy in the game is comparing the initial to the final phrase. The game illustrates beautifully how quickly information can be corrupted because of indirect communication. “A slick feature filled communication device” becomes “a thick creature killed common station mice” but what is humorous and fun in a kid’s game can be expensive and frustrating when designing a new product.
Indirect communication takes many forms and happens during all stages of the design process and needs to be short circuited whenever possible…
• During research and observation involve the designers or at minimum video the research and provide this to the designers
• While user testing make sure all designers on the project will attend
• When talking about visual concepts draw what you are talking about
• Whenever there is an issue with production or products get to the scene and see it first hand.
Questions are a designer’s best tool and the truly great designers are never afraid to ask them or worry about appearing foolish. Questions cut through all the miscommunications and get down to the core of what’s at stake. “Is this what you meant?” “Can we do it this way?” “Does this illustration capture what we were just talking about?” “Why can’t we do this?” Questions help uncover assumptions and really clarify the issues and underlying content.
If you ever play telephone with a group and everyone is allowed to ask many questions the game would be terrible but the communication would be great. So on a design problem when in doubt ask and when you think that you know the answer, confirm that your answer agrees with the other members of the group.