I can practically guarantee that you do more writing in a day than you do design work. You do more talking. You do more pitching. More wondering aloud with coworkers and peers. More speculating. More defending and convincing. So few of these moments, in my experience, are seized with the same vigor for clean communication that you put into a design. So few of them are planned for their purpose, considered for their effectiveness, or evaluated for their results.
I have to be honest: Most people suck at communicating. (Not all of them, of course, but yeah, most.) And remarkably few people know how much it’s affecting their ability to lead.
This happens because people tend to be bad at the thing at the very core of good communication: clear thinking. The human brain just isn’t very good at turning off all the noise of the day so it can focus on a concise, clear message. It’s just not an easy thing to do.
But failing to communicate well leads to countless problems. Daily problems. Financial problems. PR problems. An unclear message results in an inaccurate interpretation, that leads to guesswork, and next thing you know, you’re wasting hours and hours trying to clarify details that you thought should have been understood from the beginning.
That’s why it’s so important to master communication. To learn to say things with purpose—a purpose of clarity, concision, and completeness.
And you do that by using tools.
This chapters covers tricks to good communication.
The first thing you get when thinking about pretty much anything is a bunch of scattered thoughts that threaten to ramble and confuse anyone who would hear them. These are not the thoughts you want to put out into the universe. If they’re rambling to you, they’ll be insufferable to anyone else.
First drafts are notoriously bad. The better communication is the one several drafts further down the road. Sadly, most people stop at the first draft.
Clear thinking comes from applying some structure to those thoughts. You achieve coherent communication by applying a sort of framework to your otherwise disorganized, stream-of-consciousness-style internal monologue.
The framework is like a college essay—the kind with a thesis and supporting statements.
Set a direction
Decide on a main point you’d like to get across and state it right away. If information is like a hand-drawn map, this initiating idea is like the part where you take out the paper and write “North” at the top.
Go there
Spell out all the ideas that lead to the takeaway. If your direction is that you think the company should consider fixing a backlog of problems with a current product, here is where you explain what the problems are, how much they cost the company, how much facing them could make the company later on, and how long it all might take.
Tie it all up
You opened with a direction; now you’ve reached it. Restate your main idea and either end with a call to action or a question. Or simply stop talking. (That one’s really difficult to do for a lot of people.)
Not everything that needs to be communicated is this complicated. When it is, however, such as when you’re initiating a project, describing a plan or approach, or pitching an idea, this clarity in thought is crucial. Knowing your destination makes your communications deliberate.
I asked Christina Wodtke what she thought were the most valuable skills a designer could have that were also the least represented in the design industry. On her list:
“Communication—verbal and written communication—is incredibly high and remarkably rare,” she said, “and I’m not sure why. If you want your work to go live, you have to present it, and I’m amazed at how poor presentation skills are—setting people up, telling them what kind of feedback you want, explaining your choices, bringing them on the journey.”
What she’s talking about is the idea of pointing your design skills at yourself. Learning to apply your design chops to your own day-to-day communication.
Christina continued:
“It’s just a matter of saying, ‘You know all that stuff I just did with the interface?’—or whatever you’re working on—‘Now let me apply it to my own personal interface.’ Let’s try to be clear. Let’s give a clear call to action. Let’s be user friendly. Many designers aren’t as user-friendly as they should be.”
Despite this being an era in which we use the written word to communicate more than at any point in human history, people seem to have worse writing skills than ever. But it has so many advantages that we should all take it more seriously.
First, writing is a thinking exercise. Many, if not most, professional writers consider writing to be the tool they use to develop ideas, not just relay them. They write to find out what they think. Writing forces you to have complete thoughts. It forces you to stay on a subject, to think through it completely. Then it allows you to see your whole idea in front of you where you can revise it. Improve it.
Here’s my advice from Experience Required:
If writing is something you struggle with, consider ways to improve at it. Simply getting a handle on the basic tools of writing can significantly affect every project you work on. Sentence structure, grammar, punctuation, organization—all of that helps you be clearer with your colleagues about project details. To be more persuasive. To be more deliberate.
Look at writing classes at a local community college. Check out writing courses online, like those offered in the Gotham Writers’ Professional Development section. Find writers you like and study the ways they write, the same way you study great designers. Dig up some books on the subject.
My personal favorites are:
- The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White (Longman): Even if you just got out of a college English course—especially if—start here. This is a classic book that gets you cutting down on the flourish and passive voice they so appreciate in academia and truck commercials, and get you writing straight, clean, functional sentences that cut to the chase. But be warned: If you stop with this book alone, you’ll regret it.
- On Writing Well, by William Zinsser (Harper Perennial): Everyone has a book that changed their lives. This is one of mine. It focuses on the principles, methods, and forms of nonfiction writing, and even breaks down what’s specific to various types of nonfiction.
- How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, by Stanley Fish (Harper Paperbacks): If you hated Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, this book offers a nice counter to it, tossing out the standard arguments for sheer minimalism and looking into structures and styles that can make your writing not only functional and purposeful but beautiful.
- Several Short Sentences About Writing, by Verlyn Klinkenborg (Vintage): If you get into writing at all—even if you don’t—nothing will blow your mind more than this one. Nothing will make you a more concise and elegant communicator. Every sentence begins on a new line, a fact that illustrates at every step the effect of a sentence standing on its own. Each one is as pure as can be. It not only teaches you how to write with mastery, it leads by example. (If you’ve read my tiny tome The Tao of User Experience, know that I wrote it immediately after reading Several Short Sentences About Writing. I haven’t been the same since.)
The books in this list offer a superior, and very quick, education on how to get your ideas across, and how to form them well in the first place.
After you practice all these things for a while, with any luck you’ll notice a couple of interesting benefits. The first is that you’ll learn to better enable comprehension for your recipient. (Of course, their willingness and ability to read for comprehension are beyond your control.)
You’ll notice two things in particular:
Ernest Hemingway wrote at a fourth-grade reading level. Not because he read at a fourth-grade level, but because simplicity begets understanding. In fact, very few well-known writers write above an eighth-grade reading level. When the point is to be clear, short sentence containing plain language and straightforward information always does the job better than flowery, complicated sentences jammed full of information that would be best split out into multiple sentences.
Once you notice this fact as a recipient of information, you can employ it as a conveyor of information. Learning to read and listen for comprehension teaches you to write and speak for comprehension.
One key to saying something with purpose is making the recipient more eager to hear your message. And the best way to do that is to map what you’re talking about to what they want to hear.
I’m not suggesting you learn to pander—to simply tell people whatever will appease them the most handily. I’m suggesting you find the connection between what you need to know or to get done and the concerns and cares your recipient is most likely to have. The CEO of a company larger than a startup rarely cares about the specifics of a design, for example. Rather, that kind of CEO cares about how the design will draw in new customers and retain existing customers. When you talk about a design to the CEO, then, spend very little time on how it works, and more time on the data and other insights that brought you to the conclusion that it will help the company and on precisely how it will help. Likewise, if you’re trying to talk the CEO out of a bad idea, focus on demonstrating how the idea might negatively affect dollar signs later on.
As a manager, this mind set will help you justify your recommendations to both your team and to your own bosses. It will give you the power to get more things done.
This will take some diligence. It’s not something you can remember from time to time. It’s a practice. (Arguably, it should’ve been included in Chapter 2. But it makes more sense here in context of discussing communication.) I say this because it’s the kind of behavior that helps you exponentially. Over time, the more you stick to this mind set, the more people will inherently trust your recommendations. The more they’ll know you are worth listening to. The more they’ll know you are a person they want at the meeting, at the table, on the project, out in front.
Do yourself a huge favor:
Once you get the hang of this approach to communication, teach the rest of your team how to do it, too. Everyone needs to be able to speak the language of the other roles in the company, and doing so is yet another thing that will build your team’ s reputation.