For a while I’ve been troubled by the effect that language can have on the group design process. When we began to come up with ideas and solutions for ITV’s online news proposition, we used terminology to share our individual understanding and to communicate different solutions between us - we would use the words “feed” and “stream” interchangeably, as were phrases like “topic landing page” and “dynamically generated index page”. You could say that this is a natural symptom of having multiple humans from different backgrounds with different mindsets working together on the same shared problem. We want very different people working together, this is good. But what we want less of is the misunderstandings, confusion and antagonistic recollections. We want more group flow, enthusiasm, cohesion and personal investment so that we can use less energy for more benefit.
One approach would be for groups not to use words at all - to sketch every proposed solution. But clearly this would be quite taxing. Sketching is a great place to start - to sketch a solution which we can then slap labels onto. Labels serve as hooks for our coats, even if we have to create strange esoteric terms. Providing we all share them, it's progress.
"... if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946 (Thanks Cath)
Most of the communication during the design process is abstract, especially early on. And abstract thinking causes us to grasp at words to make sense, to capture it and ground the idea somehow. This is because tangible and grounded thinking is easier than abstract.
I’m finding more and more that the best place to be when designing a new thing is to have a small team of talented people, caring about different disciplines and practices, sitting around a table and talking, drawing, explaining, arguing and agreeing, evolving the perspectives of each other. Everyone is discussing the problems at hand but each is worrying about their own areas of expertise. One person is thinking about the technical and infrastructure aspects, another is thinking about (and talking to, and watching) users, someone's thinking about the aesthetic principles, another is thinking about the impacts on the business and another is thinking about something altogether different.
Everyone has their own mental models to understand basic principles. If I say to you “There’s a spoon and it’s sticking out of a tall glass, inside the glass there is something milky and cold...”, you might immediately think of milkshake, another person might think about Angel Delight, someone else might be thinking of jelly covered in carnation milk. You may even begin to add new attributes to the model - a cherry on top, a strawberry smell and a pinkish hue or a small paper doily for it to rest on. Solutions present themselves based on the mental model you’ve chosen. Do you ever have the kind of conversation that feels like an argument and by the end of it, you both realise you’re talking about exactly the same thing? You’re agreeing, you’re just choosing different words. We prefer our own words because using someone else’s requires more energy and we instinctively tend to land-grab, even when the land is abstract.
So what I think is most important in this kind of team design process is to evolve shared mental models. We can all understand the problem context in a similar (not exactly the same) way, which means we can all look at it from the different angles through our different lenses. A shared model comes about by explaining the detail of what we mean, of agreeing to use one term in favour of another.
The closer the group’s shared mental model is with that of the intended user of the design, the better. But we must be careful of leaky shop talk.
It’s vital that we spend as much time as possible sharing our understanding of words and mental models when we use them, to invent new models together and to explain what we mean when we use non-standard words, even if they are simple. It might seem obvious but it’s important because sitting around talking and taking the time to explain what we mean by the words we use feels like a waste of our time, when in fact, it’s possibly the most important thing we can do.
The best indication that you’re employing good shared models is that nobody quite knows exactly where the good ideas came from.
As far as is possible, we should avoid using new words, metaphors and concepts until we’ve explained what we mean by them. When you're attempting to explain something and you get a response like like “Ooohh, you mean a ...” - that’s a moment when one model collides with another. At this point you need to do as much as you can to agree on the same model and discuss this model as much as possible.
This kind of shared model might resemble groupthink, which it could certainly be a part of, but the important thing to bear in mind is that all shared models should be externally validated.
