Think Like an Artist and Write UX Reports Your Clients Will Love

Be Disruptive and Bring New Meaning

Today, we hear much about disruptive design—especially in the context of encouraging disruptive thinking to stimulate innovation. It is important for UX designers and strategists to embrace our roles as facilitators of disruption. This can extend to our written deliverables, too.

But this has happened before. Back in the days before the world had suffered through two world wars, visual art was dealing with a newfangled upstart: photography. Artists were expressing feeling and atmosphere through Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. But, by the time World War I was over, the art world had exploded into many different movements, in reaction to the horrors they witnessed during the war.

The Dada movement is one such example. As part of its rejection of the prevailing standards of what art was, the Dada movement loved juxtaposition, bringing various elements together in new and unexpected ways to evoke new meanings. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, shown in Figure 2, uses a ceramic urinal to express humor and irony.

Consider enlivening your UX reports with something more expressive than a flowchart and some pullquotes.

Start with What’s Familiar

It’s helpful to remember that, even in the art world, change didn’t always occur through disruptive innovation. Paul Cézanne has been credited with being the bridge from 19th-century Impressionism to 20th-century Cubism, but he did this through iteration, not innovation. In his movement to Cubism, he adopted the color treatments of his contemporaries like Camille Pissarro, then applied his own logical thinking about color to traditional subjects like still lifes, as in the example shown in Figure 3, and landscapes. This quotation from him sounds very contemporary: “Get to the heart of what is before you, and continue to express yourself as logically as possible.”

Any seasoned workshop facilitator would agree that everyone participating in a workshop first needs to be in a safe, familiar mental space before they can step out—creatively or otherwise. Similarly, we know that we have a better chance of winning clients and stakeholders over to a particular solution through our writing if we start with what is familiar, then create logical connections to our new approach or solution. Can you reframe something that that is very familiar to your client? Can you present something in a new light?

Show a Sense of Proportion

Another artist who took up the Cubism torch at one point in his career was Piet Mondrian. In his paintings, Mondrian iterated toward an abstract style called Neo-Plasticism, which reduced all forms to clean straight black lines and planes of white and primary colors.

I think this should act as a reminder for UX professionals to mentally step back from the details of any report to look for the areas it is most important for clients to understand. If we address what is most important to our clients, they’ll be more likely to agree to our solutions and designs. So, if you could reduce your approach to just one idea, what would it be? If your entire report comprised just three specific phrases that you’d want your client stakeholders to be dropping into their own conversations with others, what would they be?

Be Transparent

“My three-year-old daughter could paint that!” Many of us have had the experience of standing in front of a work of art and dismissing it because we just didn’t get it. Or perhaps, not only did we not get it, we couldn’t even see how there would be anything for anyone to get. If you look at works like Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square or the slashed canvas of Lucio Fontana’s Concept Spatiale, it can be easy to dismiss these important works if you don’t know their back story.

This is entirely appropriate for art, but it doesn’t work when it comes to communicating in words! For many people, the field of user experience is just as opaque as art. It also groans under the weight of self-referential, though necessary thinking, as well as proprietary terms and acronyms. (Is anyone up for an evening of IA card sorting, affinity mapping, or sprint planning?) When we want to establish credibility with our clients, it’s important that we don’t confuse our audiences by using too much UX terminology.

When we use esoteric UX terminology, our peers in user experience will understand what we’re saying, but we risk alienating our clients. The last thing you want is for the value of your blazing insights and your game-changing UX strategy to be lost to your client decision makers because it’s hidden behind terminology they don’t understand. When creating reports, it’s best to write in ways that communicate powerfully to both types of audiences.

Let Your Favorite Art Inspire You and Your Work

Michelangelo once said, “A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.” Whenever I leaf through the various art history books on my shelves at home, I always find new ways of applying artists’ thinking to my own work. What about you? Do you have a favorite artist or a favorite work of art? Try doing a bit of UX research on that artist. Delve into what was going on in an artist’s life and how that was reflected in their thinking and expression. What you find may well unlock new areas of your own creativity and thinking that you can apply to user experience.