Strategies for Communicating Design Ideas to Non-designers
Conference Archive
Learning Solutions Conference & Expo 2013 - March 14, 2013

Trina Rimmer
Sr. Manager of Marketing and Customer Engagement
Articulate
Project stakeholders and subject matter experts (SMEs) generally communicate in a language that’s very different from the language designers use. Concepts like storyboarding, interactivity, authoring tools, or terms like cognitive dissonance, may mean a lot to designers, but are usually over the heads of results-oriented contributors.
In this session, participants will explore practical communication strategies and language and get tips that can help bridge communication gaps between themselves and business leaders, SMEs, and other key contributors. By dropping design jargon, understanding how to pick your battles, and learning how to tailor communication to a group of non-designers, you’ll be able to conduct more effective project and needs analysis meetings, enhance the quality of communication and collaboration across teams, and pitch more effective learning solutions.
In this session, you will learn:
- How the same “design speak” that supports designer and developer collaboration can impede communications with non-designers
- Practical communication strategies for better project planning
- Pointers for conducting more meaningful, results-oriented needs analysis conversations with SMEs
- Tips for using online tools and resources to ease communications between you and your SMEs
Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers, developers, and project managers who have
at least some prior instructional design or development experience in a corporate
learning environment or as a freelance consultant working directly with key
contributors and subject matter experts.
Handouts
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