Category: Writing a book

I’ve decided to share the interviews I’m doing for the book as I do them.
Check them out on talkingdesign.io

The first topic I’m going to research and write about for my book is: giving and receiving feedback on designs and creative work.

How to communicate in a way that is constructive, get your point across and motivate individuals to do better work? How to deal with mindless feedback? And how to ask for feedback so you can get the best out of people?

Tell me your story

My plan is to write a short practical book for designers. The idea is to research about certain topics, collect stories and experiences through a series of interviews, review drafts with early adopters (colleagues who kindly offered to help) and write about practical techniques and examples that help designers in their day-to-day communication.

I’m planning to commit 6 hours/week. This doesn’t sound like a lot but it’s probably realistic to do aside a full-time job. I hope this helps me focus. After talking with a couple of authors, I’m confident I can make this work. We shall see and I’ll be reviewing this plan at the end of every sprint.

Any ideas or comments, do drop me a line by email or Twitter (@marianamota).

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I’m starting researching and writing a book in an Agile way, with sprints, user feedback and iterations. I’ll share my plan later. With that, it comes the product backlog with epic topics.

Help me prioritise the backlog of topics. This will help me understand what people would also find interesting and what topics to start with:

Survey: What topics do you find interesting?
(it will take only a minute)

I’ve decided to start writing a book about verbal communication and leadership skills for designers. This is a subject I have been researching for the past couple of years, giving talks about it and experiencing in my day-to-day job. Now I’ll get deep down into research, do interviews, get contributions and write a book about it.

Inspired by Leo Babauta’s blog post on the iterative way to write a book, I’ve decided that I will write it in small chunks and I need your help. If you are a designer or work in the creative industry and you fancy giving feedback once every couple of months on parts of a chapter, please, get in touch! I’m looking for a handful of designers to give me feedback on the content.

A brief introduction about my motivations and of what you can expect:

I’m an introvert. I love silence.
My whole professional life so far has been focused on communicating visually.
The industry I am in is predominantly men. I’m a woman.
The language I speak everyday is not my mother language.

I’m highly interested in verbal communication. For me, it’s the most challenging part of my job and life in general. And when get it right, it’s highly gratifying.

The designer is fundamentally a visual communicator. To get that right, though, we need to be able to receive a good brief, have stakeholders understand our rationale behind our design decisions, sell our ideas, talk to users, facilitate workshops, lead client meetings, have developers understand what we are trying to do, give constructive feedback to other designers and get team members to buy in. These are all verbal forms of communication that come with visual support (sketches, flow diagrams, mock ups).

The role of designer today is not only to communicate visually but also to facilitate conversations and provide clarification to a whole project team. I find designing the easiest part of my job, not saying it’s easy, but it’s the peripherals of my job that I find most challenging everyday. No design will go anywhere without good verbal communication.

Some topics I’m planning to write about:

• The role of a designer and how it has changed in the past few years
• Leadership vs facilitator languages
• Introducing design to a well established company
• What account managers can teach us about talking to clients
• What project managers can teach us about getting the team’s buy in
• Communicating with designers
• Communicating with developers
• Gender differences when it comes to verbal communication in workplace
• Giving and receiving feedback
• Facilitating user interviews
• Leading UX and stakeholder workshops
• Leading multidisciplinary team meetings
• Presenting your design ideas to clients and doing pitch presentations
• Networking for introverts

Which of these sections above would you be most interested in? Take this quick survey.

If you fancy helping, get in touch by email or through Twitter.