Your hidden superpowers - part two: designers can explain anything

Your gift for explaining things can change your career

Last week we talked about how designers are great investigators. Now we’re going to explore how designers are great at explaining things and how to use this power to change how coworkers see you.

The power of explainers  

The biblical Tower of Babel fell not because of failed design or engineering knowledge, but because the people building it lost the ability to understand each other. The same problem explains the dysfunctions of many organizations. The working world is an overwhelming sea of jargon and doublespeak, spoken and written words that drown productivity and morale. Even smart, talented, well-intentioned people end up confused, disorganized, and demoralized. Expensive productivity apps and communication tools are perennially promised as the solution, but it’s a fantasy silver bullet because the real problem is social—a lack of communication skills and common language—not technological.

This means someone who explains things clearly, including through insightful sketches, diagrams, or metaphors, has tremendous value. Explainers help people make sense of each other. Designers are often shy about their ability to explain things, but typically we’re better at this than other professionals, since our work is rooted in communication (even visual design is rooted in semiotics, the study of symbols and their meaning). If we can be curious about our coworkers’ perspectives, objectives, and frustrations, we can be translators. Translators have power: they can become the key link in how project teams function. Good leaders depend on their translation skills to earn trust and help better ideas arise. Designers can also do this, and when we do, our jobs become easier.

In the book, Communicating the UX Vision: 13 Anti-Patterns That Block Good Ideas, authors Martina Hodges-Schell and James O'Brien asked designers to interrogate their own communication breakdowns: 

Think back over your latest project and see if there are moments of disagreement or circular conversations that could be explained by this mismatch of semantics. Were there moments where you dismissed or failed to understand a concern because it was in a different dialect?

They call out the fact that in design education, little time is spent on communication skills, even though in our work as advisors, our communication matters more than our design skills (as we explained in the ego trap). We have to communicate with stakeholders before we design anything, or even after, to get their approval. Hodges-Schell and O’Brien add:

As designers, we have the perfect toolkit to collect the dialects of our organization, translate them into a simple visual form everyone can understand, and capture them in a common vocabulary for the life of the project.

It’s worth emphasizing that visual explanations play to our strengths, and science supports our unique powers. Images are processed in older parts of our brains than text (written language is a very recent invention), which is why humans process visual information faster. As education expert Lynell Burmark explained: 

Unless our words, concepts, ideas are hooked onto an image, they will go in one ear, sail through the brain, and go out the other ear. Words are processed by our short-term memory…. Images, on the other hand, go directly into long-term memory where they are indelibly etched.

Below is what should be a familiar example, presented in two different ways. There’s a palpable difference in the experience of consuming a concept through visuals than through text. Explaining things well visually is satisfying in a way that’s hard to describe but everyone recognizes. 

If you’re ever the only designer in a meeting, see it as an advantage. If you listen for points of confusion and volunteer ways to reduce it, people will love you. During a difficult meeting, where people are arguing and not listening to each other, go to the whiteboard, draw a quick sketch, or even a 2x2 table of the possible pros and cons, and say, “Do you mean this or this?” Often, magic happens. From your prompts, people start using parts of their brains that were sleeping, the parts better suited for metaphor, creative thinking, and collaboration. Even if they say what you drew was wrong and correct it, the meeting has been transformed, thanks to your initiative. They may at first see your contribution as simply making things prettier (which can be an achievement too), but pay attention to who notices the deeper problem you solved: they are your future allies.