A Common Language
Insights about the craft usually don't strike me in the present moment, but in retrospect. As need arises during the course of a design project, I pick a tool or method based on knowledge, research and discussion with other designers. Then one day, after the project is set aside and weeks or months have passed since it was last touched, a 'flash' of insight strikes.
These 'flashes' of insight or 'eureka' moments, more common now that I am between jobs with enough distance from work to take earnest inventory of the craft, are of two kinds. First: the past choice of a tool or method was spot on, and second: I could have done things differently.
Some of these insights are about user journey mapping. The last time I journey mapped an experience was at the heels of a user research study for an e-commerce project. We (a duo comprising me and another designer), having conducted user interviews and analysis, were faced with the task of structuring the analysis. Even more important, we wanted to recontextualise the research as a design vision that would act as a sturdy bridge, helping us — the design team and the client team, but especially the client team — transition with certitude from research to design execution.
Initially, journey mapping did not cross my mind; I believed scenarios were the best way to articulate a design vision across most kinds of projects. By scenarios, I'm referring to a storyboarding technique, not use cases, which sometimes the word 'scenarios' is coopted to mean.
I discovered scenarios in late '21, in a design course where scenarios were highly espoused, and for good reasons. Compared with user journey maps, scenarios, through overt storytelling, are laser focused on answering — how does a product or service fit with the users' life? They dial in on specific aspects of experience where problems and opportunities lie.
After watching multiple scenarios — my own, and others' — dissected by experts, I felt sure-footed about using scenarios to set a design vision for future projects. Yet when it came to setting a design vision for the above e-commerce project, I found myself choosing journey mapping over scenarios.
But first, some context. In initial meetings with the client team, something was out of sync. When we first showed them our user research plan, they were sceptical. We had designed the research questions to be non-leading; the client interpreted the questions to be unexacting. Even though I didn’t have words to articulate it, I certainly sensed tension between how we both approached design.
After a few more interactions with the client, I pinned it down: they were accustomed to a product-centric approach. Our research questions were more experience-focused, and less product-touchpoint-focused. We leaned hard into an experience-focused approach, hoping to earn their trust, but it only exacerbated their lack of trust.
Although the design problems listed in our brief appeared simple, on closer inspection, they were wicked problems. And wicked they would remain if we didn't first address the underlying issue: the gaping divide (see illustration above) between our design approaches. Aware that being faithful to our experience-focused approach would only yield band-aid solutions to a wicked problem, we decided to toe the line between our experience-focused approach and the client's product-centric approach. In other words, we took steps to meet the client team where they were in terms in UX maturity, instead of begrudging their lower UX maturity.
We did this not only while setting a vision, but throughout the design process. When designing personas, for instance, we listed as many end goals — ie. what the user wants to do — as experience goals and life goals — ie. how the user wants to feel and who the user wants to be.
Back to why I chose journey mapping, even though my training predisposed me to pick scenarios. Compared with scenarios, journey maps circumvent storyboarding and leverage storytelling in a more restrained way. They are less laser-focused on answering, how does this product or service fit with the user's life? In this sense, journey maps are more product-centric than scenarios, and this can be a good thing when we’re dealing with clients who aren’t quite ready for a purely experience-focused approach.
Journey maps would help us toe the line between product and UX, thus making our ideas more apt to be heard by the client. With this understanding, my team and I pivoted from scenarios to user journey mapping.
A useful way of thinking about this approach is that it is like being in a state of dual-citizenship. The designer holds the tension between the two approaches as she goes back and forth between an experience-focused approach and a product-centric approach.
I cannot help but look back at my experience learning to sign. With no interpreter involved from the outset, all communication between the ISL instructor and me — I didn't know how to sign the alphabet, never mind grammar — was in sign. It isn’t that the instructor couldn’t lip read. Having spent her life accommodating hearing people in spaces that didn't accommodate her, she had become quite adept at lip reading. But even the best lip reading is about 70% guesswork. The only capitulation, if I had any business trying to learn sign language, was to do the work, no shortcuts.
And the work wasn’t limited to learning the language. 40% of learning to sign is about learning to appreciate deaf culture. Our initiation into deaf culture is marked by someone in the deaf community helping us pick a name that becomes as integral to our identity as the name on our passport. As such, language and identity are inextricably woven.
For deaf performer and sound artist Christine Sun Kim, sound is social currency; maintaining it demands a lot of work. And yet, since the experience of hearing sound can be visual or spatial and not only auditory, she knows sound.
She explains, the musical symbol p means to play softly. Four ps mean to play an instrument extremely softly. A p-tree with thousands of ps demonstrates quietness, but not complete silence. She demonstrates the sign language gesture for the term over night. With subtle changes, the gesture changes to mean last night. Her TED Talk, delivered in ASL, does more justice to these ideas; writing them on the page somewhat defeats their purpose. Still, if it may behoove us to take away one idea from the talk, it would be that even a hearing person can delight in the experience of sound beyond hearing.
In this sense, as a hearing person immerses herself into sign language, she becomes a dual-citizen of the speaking world and the signing world.
Practicing two design approaches, then, is almost like learning to speak two different languages through immersion in two different cultures. Like being a dual-citizen. This state of dual-citizenship in our interactions with the client necessitated that we refrain from pushing UX. Pushing UX would have required us to insist on staying where we were and expecting the client to come towards us. Instead, we decided to move towards them (see illustration below). Then we crossed our fingers and hoped for the best.
Is this a zero-sum game?
I know now the decision to refrain from pushing UX was courageous. Not because I want to toot my horn but because I was told, under the guise of advice, that to be taken seriously as a designer I needed to push UX and be assertive.
In the book Never Split the Difference, author Chris Voss writes that assertiveness is about “giving an inch” and “taking an inch”. He identifies types of negotiators which include: assertives and analysts. Chris Voss, who believes he is an assertive type, writes, “for assertives, every silence is an opportunity to speak more”. He contrasts this with analytical types I identify with, for whom “silence means they want to think”.
The typing struck me as one-dimensional, with assertives described as “fiery people who love winning above all else, often at the expense of others.” How could I, as an analytical type be assertive without becoming a paper-thin stereotype?
Having read the book, still unsure but curious as to what assertiveness could mean for me as a creative moving through the design industry with some degree of autonomy, I decided to try on the via negativa approach: I could try to understand what assertiveness wasn’t, eg. giving an inch / taking an inch.
Today, with more perspective, I know to articulate it as mature assertiveness. It is tethered to Self, not the pseudo self, concepts described in the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model. (Richard C. Schwartz, the creator of IFS, prefers the less judgmental term self-like parts to refer to the pseudo self.)
Mature assertiveness is also less illusory than the type of assertiveness mentioned in Chris Voss' book. Before he wrote the book, Chris Voss worked with the FBI as a hostage negotiator for two decades. Design reviews, how ever tense they may be, are not hostage negotiations. And so I'd rather not choose to walk into a design review with the bad faith attitude of winning at any cost.
To shed light on this attitude, Paul Watzlawick draws on game theory in the book, The Situation Is Hopeless, but Not Serious.
Even if the other did not originally see life as a constant street fight, he can be converted to this view. The first partner only needs to insist on playing a zero-sum game on the relationship level, and one may rest assured that things will go to hell. For what zero-sum players are likely to overlook, stuck as they are with the idea of having to win so as not to lose, is that greatest opponent of all, life, and all that life has to offer quite apart from victory and defeat. Vis-à-vis that opponent, both zero-sum partners lose.
The conventional wisdom of pushing design, as I see it, often leans on the "constant street fight" world view. It tends to boil down all negotiation into the oversimplified win-lose binary, when good design choices are more complex. More myth than truth, the approach of pushing design runs counter to real world collaborative dynamics that are more likely to resemble a non-zero sum game than a zero sum game.
And although it is sufficient for one expert zero-sum player to convert others to their parochial "street fight" world view, it is also sufficient that one designer insists on playing by the rules of a different game. The non-zero sum game. The more she does it, embodying a mature and self-differentiated assertiveness, as Bowen’s theory describes it, the more pushback she would receive. Such pushback must be expected in zero-sum systems.
Being steadfast in insisting on non-zero sum maturity isn’t easy. But it is certainly achievable and worthwhile. Like the slow-growing roots of a tree that gradually pull up a concrete sidewalk.
This isn’t to say that non-zero sum maturity is about meeting in the middle. Once during a design review, the client team proposed numerous design ideas, expecting all the ideas to be executed in addition to the ideas proposed by our design team. I sensed good intentions. They were trying to create a sense of team cohesion by meeting the designers in the middle and proposing that all ideas receive democratic treatment.
I concurred (many of the ideas they’d proposed were very state-of-the-art, no argument there) as long as we were aware of a caveat — the resulting solution wouldn’t have elegance. Catering to the whims of those who built it (myself included) instead of users’ needs, the design solution would be non-cohesive.
While listening to and considering everyone’s ideas and suggestions is a good practice, incorporating them all to maintain pseudo harmony and an illusion of team cohesion isn’t the most maturely assertive thing to do. Instead, acknowledging ideas that align best with project outcomes would help the team move with non zero-sum maturity — albeit imperfect maturity (because the quest for maturity doesn’t end in one’s lifetime) — towards the outcomes.
Looking back, I view our project as a series of calculated choices I didn't have the language to expertly articulate. The more I reflect, the more I come across language that adds weight to past choices. Bowen's theory is one example. Debbie Millman — designer, author and host of the podcast, Design Matters — using the phrase courage over confidence in several talks is another. Only upon hearing her use this phrase did it click that this is precisely what we were trying to do, against all odds. We were choosing courage over confidence.
It seems heroic, but it wasn't. Choices that seem courageous today were nothing but risks in the past. Risk-taking isn't sexy, notwithstanding all the bombast by thought leaders of the world about the rewards of risk-taking. When I look back at risky creative choices of the past, often in the middle of running daily errands, it slowly but definitively dawns on me that underpinning most of these choices was courage.
Future-state boundary objects
Our design team sought client alignment with the design vision before moving towards design execution; to this end, we hoped journey mapping would be adequate. It turned out to be so much more. Showing the client team our journey map was an enriching exercise. Every one chimed in with their perspectives and questions.
For instance, the dip in the user experience depicted by the emotional journey mirrored the dramatic decline in the conversion funnel and validated their analytics data findings. The journey map also had two wide swim lanes for opportunities, one for each main actor, ie. the primary and secondary personas. The detailed opportunities turned out to be one of the highlights of the exercise and generated much discussion.
By contrast, only a couple of weeks prior, the client's reaction to our research report had been lukewarm. At the time, I attributed their response to this: As visual artefacts, user journey maps are easier to understand and even less intimidating than dense research reports. So journey maps are preferrable to reports when it comes to presenting research analysis.
This was confirmed, by chance, by a book I was reading at the time. In her book Continuous Discovery Habits, Teresa Torres belabours the importance of drawing and mapping complex concepts.
Stick figures and smiley faces are perfectly okay. But drawing engages a different part of your brain than language does. It helps us see patterns that are hard to detect in words and sentences.
While it is naïve to underestimate the power of language to communicate design choices, as every designer carrying a dog-eared Articulating Design Decisions in her back pocket will attest, situations that call for drawing and mapping aren't uncommon in a designer's day-to-day. Drawing consolidates and simplifies complex patterns in ways that even the most persuasive language cannot, enabling big-picture thinking. So the journey map was the better option compared with the research report when it came to communicating our research insights with the client.
Another seminal book that was influential in shaping my mind was Temple Grandin's Visual Thinking. It spurred me to confront biases — individual and collective — that not only lead to the exclusion of those who are wired to be non-linear visual thinkers but also the erasure of any proclivity for non-linear visual thinking in oneself.
Plus, there was another reason to which I attributed the success of the journey mapping exercise with the client: Since design is largely perceived as a visual medium and drawing and mapping are visual activities, stakeholders would be more apt to listen to a designer who draws and maps concepts than a designer who doesn't.
I now see it differently. As a visual artefact, the journey map was effective in communicating design opportunities, yes. But there is more to it. Mapping, as we attempted to articulate a design vision, was necessary but not sufficient for creating the impact we desired. Something else — I didn’t know what — made journey maps special.
I understood what it was, after seeing user journey maps described as boundary objects in the book This Is Service Design Doing.
While all of them look at the same object, they all identify different problem areas, come to different conclusions, and generate different ideas. In this case, the journey map acts as a “boundary object.” It helps people from different backgrounds and communities of practice to collaborate on a common task.
As boundary objects, user journey maps help people on different sides of a boundary want to look at the object in the first place, albeit through different perspectives. In this sense, journey maps reduce stakeholder resistance, which was our goal.
If user journey maps, as visual artefacts, are boundary objects, then we may ask: Are all visual artefacts boundary objects? Take a flow model drawn by researchers to visualise a complex day-to-day task flow; like journey maps, a key purpose of flow models is to facilitate communication. However, in case of flow models and other contextual inquiry modeling techniques, the communication is typically directed internally and within the research discipline. Journey maps, on the other hand, facilitate cross-disciplinary communication.
Further, unlike flow modeling, journey mapping entails different — perhaps even higher — stakes: setting a design vision to help teams transition from research to design execution. The success of the design vision depends on how well the vision is communicated between disciplines, thus hinging on how well the journey mapping is done: ie. the extent to which the journey map is based on research instead of assumptions. Thus journey maps, unlike some other forms of visual maps and models, act as cross-disciplinary boundary objects.
As such, the user journey map as a boundary object, made it possible for us to communicate our design vision with the client. And while this effort by and large succeeded, something essential was missing.
In an HCI course I attended in '21, it was drilled into my head that ‘after’ scenarios are a key component of the design vision; without them, ‘before’ scenarios were inchoate. While ‘before’ scenarios define gaps in the user’s experience, ‘after’ scenarios, often accompanied with a low-fidelity prototype, define what the product or service would do to fill the gaps.
When deciding to use journey maps instead of scenarios, the ‘after’ component didn't occur to me. Without this component and without comple-mentary future-state journey maps, our design vision was undercooked.
Future-state journey mapping with low-fidelity prototyping was the missing ingredient the design vision needed. Our detailed opportunity lists were useful in that they generated discussions that helped us catch leap-of-faith assumptions early, before they could become too costly. But they didn't help visualise the opportunity space in the way an accompanying prototype would.
Further, a proof-of-principle prototype would have encouraged the client to share precise feedback. Precise feedback early in the design process saves much rework later, which is why in theory prototyping early in the ideation phase, not only in design revisions, is indispensable. In practice, when we’re not vigilant about the opportunity to prototype early it is easy to slip into the linear/waterfall mindset, so that by the time we start prototyping we’ve long forgotten about discovery.
Dissolving Margins
The concepts we’ve explored so far, from journey mapping and scenarios to non-zero sum games and mature assertiveness, stem from a single seedling, a raison d'etre — finding a common language.
Design, like all other disciplines, has its own language. Or jargon, if I may. According to the contention of some design leaders who dismiss design jargon, most jargon gets in the way of design trying to be close to business. Other design leaders argue that design, like all disciplines, rightfully has its own language whose value cannot be diminished, and design jargon shouldn’t interfere with business buy-in.
As I see it, design at its core is about facilitating understanding; sometimes the jargon we use — like the word vision — promotes understanding and other times it gets in the way of understanding. Regardless, designers, as dual-citizens, can work towards achieving a creative partnership with stakeholders without compromising the integrity of our craft.
The title of this essay comes from the term common language, another term for boundary objects. I smiled when I first heard this term because it reminded me of the famous Adrienne Rich poem, The Dream of a Common Language. When I started writing this essay, the similarity between the title of the essay and the poem was fortuitous; it amused me, nonetheless, as I take much comfort in poetry.
But the more I write, I realise that the similarity between the poem and this essay is more obvious than I thought. Poetry and design have one thing in common: the drive to connect.
Not so long ago, during the pandemic, I — precariously straddling careers in frontend development and SRHR — longed for connectedness and wholeness, no longer content with choosing between two careers. Neck deep in Elena Ferrante’s oeuvre at the time, I was swept away by the concept of dissolving margins. Smarginatura. Synchronistically, design found me and spurred in me the drive to connect.
With more experience and perspective, I realise that a common language is illusory but we can dream. In my early thirties, I think this may be what growing up — adulting, in millennial-ese, but more grown-up — is about. We're sure to encounter tension while navigating boundaries between engineering and product, product and UX, business and design, and increasingly AI and design. We never quite meet — design cannot merge with any other discipline without losing its essence — but good design helps us get closer to the other side. There is something wondrous about this effort.