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.