Shopify UX Director Elizabeth McGuane on why design should start with words
Before colors, shapes, or fonts come into the picture, the design process starts with the words we use to explain ideas to each other.
When you think about design, you probably picture some sketches on a whiteboard, a mockup of a product, or iterations of an interface. But a crucial part of the process happens – or should happen, at least – before the visual representation. And it’s not uncommon to go pretty far through the interface design process only to find yourself arguing over what to name something because you haven’t agreed on what it actually is.
That’s exactly what Elizabeth McGuane wants to avoid. Elizabeth is a UX and content designer, UX Director at Shopify, and a former colleague of ours here at Intercom. Having gotten her start in journalism before transitioning to UX, she has long wondered about the role of language in design, the words we use to describe things before they even exist, or the shorthands we create to simplify complex ideas into notions everyone can understand.
“We get so lost in problem statements and technical designs that we sometimes forget the creative process begins with the words we use to give shape to concepts”
We get so lost in problem statements and technical designs that we sometimes forget the creative process begins with the words we use to give shape to concepts. And it’s those words that give your design project clarity, precision, and purpose.
Drawing from her 15 years of experience in web, mobile, and product design, Elizabeth finally boiled all these ideas down into a book – Design by Definition – where she shows how linguistic elements help frame design problems clearly, improve collaboration, and uplift the entire process.
In today’s episode, Intercom’s VP of Product Design Emmet Connolly catches up with Elizabeth McGuane to talk about her love of words, incorporating semantic concepts into the design process, and the importance of building a shared language.
Here are some of the key takeaways:
- Effective design starts with boiling things down and aligning around a clear concept, ensuring a shared understanding that prevents confusion and disagreements later on.
- Creativity should also involve embracing multiple revisions and iterations, encouraging questions and open discussions, and exploring different paths when one doesn’t work.
- When designing products, you should be open to changes and pivots that can accommodate evolving user demands, technological advancements, and shifting contexts.
- Having a shared language and keeping consistent naming conventions from the code to the customer interface helps drive organizational clarity and understanding.
- Conversational design with large language models (LLMs) presents a shift in the design paradigm, challenging traditional conventions on interfaces, and even the role of design itself.
- When it comes to interfaces, treat text as a spacial design element, focusing on simplification and consistency rather than literary flourish.
If you enjoy our discussion, check out more episodes of our podcast. You can follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or grab the RSS feed in your player of choice. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the episode.
The role of language in design
Emmet Connolly: Hello and welcome to Inside Intercom. I’m Emmet Connolly, the VP of Design at Intercom, and today’s guest on the show is a very special one. Elizabeth McGuane is a UX Director at Shopify. She’s the author of a brand new book called Design by Definition. And Elizabeth is an ex-colleague – she used to work at Intercom as well. I’m very excited to have you on the show and talk to you about this intersection between design and writing that you’re addressing in the book. You’re very welcome, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth McGuane: Thanks so much, Emmet. So happy to be here.
Emmet: Do you want to share a bit about your background and your role to help people understand where you’re even coming from professionally in your approach to the topic?
“From the beginning, I was really interested in the structure of how things work in design – hierarchy, journeys, narrative, and all those things”
Elizabeth: Yeah. How far do I go back? So, I won’t give you my whole life story. But yes, I was a Content Designer at Intercom – I was the first content designer you hired. I did so many interesting things. It was such a brilliant time in my career. And I think it was there that I first had the seeds of the book, to be honest with you. I remember giving a talk to the Brand Design team where I was talking about the role of language in design, and that’s where I started digging into things like metaphor, narrative, and concepts that come up in the book. Prior to that, I started out working in newspapers. I worked at the Sunday Business Post as a copy girl, I think it was called, in a very retrograde manner. Editorial assistant, let’s say. Names are very important.
Then, I moved into UX in an agency called IQ Content, where a lot of Intercom people had worked as well. It’s now called Each&Other. I was in Dublin and then London for a long time working in agencies before I started at Intercom. So, I was a bit of a jack-of-all-trades when it came to writing, design, and information architecture. From the beginning, I was really interested in the structure of how things work in design – hierarchy, journeys, narrative, and all those things. So, when I started working in product at Intercom and then at Shopify, it allowed me to go deeper into those topics.
At Shopify, I was given the opportunity to join as a Design Manager. That’s been really amazing because I lead teams of researchers, designers, content designers, and technologists, and fuse all those different skills. It’s been really gratifying to find that the designers I work with feel supported by me and that coming in from a different approach than their background has been a benefit, as opposed to a hindrance, and has allowed me to geek out about typography, motion design, and all sorts of things that I’m really fascinated by but were not necessarily in my core skills when I started out.
“There were a lot of good books about content design already, and I didn’t want to write something that was just about how to be a better content designer or have a seat at the proverbial table”
Emmet: I mean, that was one of the things that struck me about the book reading it. When I first heard you were going to write a book, I was like, “Oh, awesome, demystifying content design or something like that.” Right? The canonical “What is content design anyway?” book. But as I read the book, I realized it was about so much more than that. Was that a process? How did you decide what the book was going to be about in the first place?
Elizabeth: Yeah. I mean, if you are a writer and you work in design, at a certain point, somebody has probably told you, “You should write a book. Why wouldn’t you?”. But for a long time, I didn’t want to write. There were a lot of good books about content design already, and I didn’t want to write something that was just about how to be a better content designer or to have a seat at the proverbial table because those had been done and done really well. And I also had this, I suppose, innate feeling that I was really interested in the outcome and the design work itself – not so much in the boundaries of discipline. The discipline conversations we’ve had over the last 25, 30, or more years in design are ongoing, but I’m not so interested in those barriers, I guess.
When I talked to A Book Apart, the first thing they said was, “We want this to be a design book. It’s partly because we have a lot of content design books in our roster, and we would love for something that sits outside of that.” It was difficult when I wrote it because I think my natural affinity was to go back to the words. I fought myself a little bit, “Oh, it has to be this big picture design book with a capital D.” I had to get out of my own way – talking about the writing is talking about the design, but to not let myself be limited by that. It was a process. I think I was pushing myself to not do the expected thing and just follow where my interest led me.
A clear concept
Emmet: Did you have an ideal reader in mind? Not a specific person, but a type of person?
Elizabeth: I kind of did have a real person, and I’ve told him this before. There’s a designer at Shopify called Johan Strömqvist. He’s a motion designer who works in our Design System team. I had given a talk that was a version of this book in Toronto in 2019 at a design leadership conference, and he contacted me afterward and was like, “Oh, this was really meaningful to me. You put to words something that I was trying to figure out, a gap that I had in my own work to do with concept definition and concept clarity.” And it was really gratifying, especially for someone who was, at the time, a new design manager. Having somebody who, to me, was one of the best and maybe the most esoteric designers within Shopify to be like, “This was really meaningful to me,” really made me feel like I could speak to a design audience.
“So much of the language we use around design, before we even get to the words on the page or have a page to put words on, is the words we use when we’re describing what we’re making”
Johan was always in the back of my mind as I was writing. Beyond that, I wanted to speak to the types of people I was leading, right? If I was thinking about content designers, I was thinking about the content designers I worked with who were sometimes working on incredibly technical things like developer problems or design system problems. They’re not just working on interfaces and writing words in interfaces. They’re really often working under the hood of the design.
Emmet: I would love someone to write a book for me in response to the biggest mysteries about work I have. Let’s stick with that because that’s an interesting example. You would not think of a motion designer finding a load of utility in something that has to do with words on a page. What did that person take from that? What might someone like that take from the book, apart from diving into the “how to write real good” aspect?
Elizabeth: I think what he took away from it was this idea that so much of the language that we use around design, before we even get to the words on the page or have a page to put words on, is the words we use when we’re describing what we’re making. And that happens really early on in whatever process you have in your company, whether that’s a brief, a project definition, or a problem statement. Often, those things aren’t even written by designers – they’re written by product managers or engineers. And so, when you bring those ideas and that language into the room where design starts, if you don’t actually take the time to define the terms you’re using… And it’s not just the objects in the system, which is what we usually think of when we’re defining terms, but literally, the concept. It is that classic “everybody’s looking at a different part of the elephant.” Everybody will take their own meaning from those words and head off in very different directions.
“You can go pretty far through the interface design process and still have people arguing over what it should be because the idea they have in their heads is really different”
So I think, for him, it is really an internal tool to make you think about the language you’re using to express your ideas to each other. When you move into interface design really quickly, it’s often because you feel motivated to get away from the messiness of words and into something that feels concrete. You’re like, “If I can see it, then we can talk about it.” But what actually happens, and I’m sure you’ve seen this as well, is that you can go pretty far through the interface design process and still have people arguing over what it should be because the idea they have in their heads is really different.
I have this example in the book of a team that was trying to design a new data product that basically looked like a spreadsheet and had rows and columns, and they just kept designing better spreadsheets with more white space and nicer colors. And then, the content designer on that team was like, “Well, let’s think of entirely different conceptual models for this.” The one she came up with was a sandwich because it’s a container that can have lots of different things inside it, but it’s always a sandwich. I loved it. It’s playful. And that term was never meant to be a word that appeared on the interface. It was never meant to literally be used as the brand name. But it was a concept that allowed the team to think about the visual design and even the marketing of the product in a very different way. To me, that’s such a great classic example of the thing that was meaningful to Johan. Clarifying the concept and having fun with it instead of trying to brush past it and move into the interface is really valuable, and it actually saves time later on.
Emmet: Yeah, there were definitely sections I was reading where I was like, “I think I know where this came from.” It sounds so familiar. I felt seen. The examples I think you give in the book where you’re saying you might have a bunch of people critiquing the superficial aspect of the design or just seeming like they’re at cross purposes, and eventually, you spend so long digging into why, and you realize that the foundational model we each hold in our heads is slightly different. Because we’re looking at the same thing through two different lenses, we will never get on the same page. The value of starting with that foundational idea is something we definitely still try to bring through in our work, and some of the stuff I think we realized when you were working here as well. You live on, Elizabeth. I don’t know if anyone’s told you this, by the way, but you even have your own custom Slack emojis.
Elizabeth: That’s the highest honor. It really is.
The sandwich effect
Emmet: Another example that you made me think of was the power of the sandwich thing – just being able to label something and have a collective shorthand to refer to it. You can collapse or compact an entire idea down to the word sandwich. And then, everyone starts saying sandwich. It’s a very handy shorthand. Having a label for complicated ideas can be super useful.
“In movies or TV shows, they’re like, ‘Oh, it’s like Mad Men but set in Ireland in the ’80s.’… People will use a shorthand in creative industries to allow you to conceptualize something in a really easy way”
Elizabeth: Absolutely. When I joined Intercom, you were like, “We have a problem with naming, and we need to solve it.” We did that research study where we got everybody to draw pictures of what they thought Intercom was, and they were all totally different. I was like, “Oh, this is really interesting. It’s not just about the name we use. People are using the same name, but they’re applying it to a totally different part of the system.” I think that’s really true.
You see this in other industries – maybe it’s top of mind because of the strikes. If you think about the way that, in movies or TV shows, they’re like, “Oh, it’s like Mad Men but set in Ireland in the ’80s.” You know what I mean? People will use a shorthand in creative industries to allow you to conceptualize something in a really easy way. We might think of it just like boiling things down, but it’s important to boil things down. We get so lost in problem statements and technical designs and stuff like that, which are really, really important, but if we don’t take that time to remember we’re making something creative, and that that creative condensing of the idea is a really important stage, we do ourselves a disservice. Then, the creative person is like, “Oh, you’re just making a mock,” instead of, “I’m trying to bring something to life that we were all trying to conceptualize together.”
Emmet: How do designers do that? You talk near the start of the book about framing and bringing to life an idea or even giving something a label or a name so we can easily refer to it. I’m a designer on a team, and everyone’s got their crossed wires all over the place – what do I actually do? Because one thing that’s easy about a mock is that I can create it and show it to people, and it’s a tangible thing, right? What strategies or advice do you have for people to try and engage with the more amorphous set of “Let’s tame an idea and all get on the same page about it”?
Elizabeth: I mean, the reality is that this can happen at different moments. The ideal canonical thing of, “Oh, you should do this at the very beginning and be really rigorous about getting your concept clear,” is wonderful if it happens, but you have to almost have made the mistake before to know that it needs to happen. You could do drawing exercises. The irony is that drawing and visual things are a really great way to get to conceptual clarity and new words. I’m sure that when the content designer came back to the room with the idea of the sandwich, she probably had to sketch out, “The bread is this part, and the lettuce is this part,” before it came to life. There’s a fusing of the two things that I think is really valuable.
“It’s important to pause and talk about the conceptual things we disagree on rather than trying to force ourselves through the pain of, ‘Let me do 18 more revs to try and match what you have in your head’”
It’s not so much about avoiding mocks. I think it’s avoiding high fidelity, if you can, and being really free with revs and iterations. We are so worried about efficiency and delivering value that sometimes we have this thing where we want to get it right the first time, and that’s not how creativity happens. If you’re really having joy in the conceptual moment, you should be willing to do a lot of sketches, show stuff to people, and make it feel lightweight, free, and easy. And also sketching things that are not interfaces, right? Sketching a concept or an idea. Sketching a journey – we do this a lot. You might even sketch the user doing things.
I think it’s good to shake yourself up and not rely on the same crutch as you always have. Because what I find is that when people are like, “Oh, I need to sketch the user journey,” and that becomes a crutch, it’s not actually giving you new ideas. Anything you do early on in the design process is worth its weight in gold only if it gives you new ideas to follow. If you’re just doing it as a matter of course, you have to think, “What is this actually giving me?”
The reality is that often, you can think you’re really aligned, and it’s only when you get into the mock stage, when you’re actually designing the interface and point at things on the page and say, “Well, what does this do? And what does this represent? What is happening here?” that you can say, “Oh, we don’t actually agree.” I think it’s important to pause and talk about the conceptual things we disagree on rather than trying to force ourselves through the pain of, “Let me do 18 more revs to try and match to what you have in your head.” Take a moment. Have a workshop. Have a drawing session where they can sketch out their idea, whether that is your design director, VP, or whoever else.
For me, the most productive things are when you have people from lots of different disciplines using the most simple tools possible, pen and paper, and you’re saying, “Hey, let’s all recognize the fact that we have a different idea here and let’s try to get all those ideas out so we can actually agree on where we’re at.” My former manager from Shopify, Amy Thibodeau, said, “It’s a book about thinking.” And it is. It is about recognizing when you’re stuck and what types of tools will get you unstuck rather than being this silver bullet process that will always work.
“It can be so frustrating to get to the end of a design process and be like, ‘Oh, we don’t agree on what to name this. We don’t agree on who the audience is. What have we spent our time making?’”
Emmet: Mm-hmm. It strikes me that it’s also useful to allow yourself to fluidly move between those levels of fidelity, almost the conceptual and the implementation, and not think of it as a one-way thing, right? Where you look at the implementation and go, “Something’s not quite right here. Let’s go and reexamine the parallels with visual design.” Sometimes, people can skip the “what are we trying to say” framing stage, go straight to visual design, and then obsess about those details when, in fact, you need to drag yourself back up a layer of abstraction and take another path at that, and maybe just go back and forth between them a little bit.
Elizabeth: If you have ignored any conceptual misalignment throughout the process and you get to the stage where you’re naming the thing and no one can agree on the name, there was a problem all along. But that is another place where it’s like, “Let’s go back to a higher level of fidelity.”
It can be so frustrating to get to the end of a design process and be like, “Oh, we don’t agree on what to name this. We don’t agree on who the audience is. What have we spent our time making?” A lot of this is about healthy design teams and having enough strength within your design team to be willing to do another rev, to go back up the layers of abstraction, to not have that feel like a loss but instead have that feel like, “No, this is making the outcome stronger.” Speaking as a design manager, that’s what I try to do for my team – make it feel safe for them to question things all the way along instead of being like, “No, no, we’re locked in. And even if we don’t know what we’re doing, we’re going to get it out there no matter what.”
Sailing through change
Emmet: Then, you’ve maybe gotten to a point where you can ship something, and the process doesn’t end there. Obviously, the process of design, but also the process of definition. Another classic Elizabeth-ism from the Intercom days was the “Ship of Theseus.” Do you want to explain that a little, and maybe talk about what happens after a product is launched and you hit these points where the product has to change?
Elizabeth: The Ship of Theseus is the idea that if you have a boat that leaves the port and you replace every board in the ship on the journey, is it still the same ship? Products are constantly changing and pivoting. The fact that they’re digital and ephemeral doesn’t mean they’re easy to change. The code is often really, really difficult, and it’s hard to change. But, there is flexibility. When you build a chair, you can take it apart down to the wood pieces, but you’re less likely to do that. And so, there’s going to be this necessity to change, and it’s just a question of allowing that expansiveness into your design thinking.
“In a perfect world, all of our platforms would be just these beautiful modular sets of capabilities that we could reform in any way”
The danger is that you start to say, “Oh, when I’m naming or designing this, I have to think about every possible future use case and allow enough flexibility into it so it could become this or that.” Because then, you lose the crux. There is this vanishing point where it’s the user seeing it – it needs to make sense to them and do something useful for them. So, I think you need to have that exactness and clarity about who you’re actually serving. But then, allow yourself to not be too attached to that outcome and to resist the change that might be necessary when you move on.
We talked about this even when I was writing the book about products and packaging. You can have a platform and want to rewrap its capabilities for new users, users who have changed, who have different needs, or for new technology that comes down the pipe. So, in a perfect world, all of our platforms would be just these beautiful modular sets of capabilities that we could reform in any way. And, of course, that isn’t always the way it is. We do lock ourselves into certain channels. And I think design leadership is the good judgment to know when it’s worth the effort to make a change and pivot, when sometimes renaming something is enough because you’re basically just repointing it at a new audience, or when it’s actually like, “No, we need to look under the hood and actually reshape what this is meant to do.”
“You have to be willing to let go of your legacy a little bit to let the product itself morph, change, and evolve”
When I started at Intercom, this quote was accredited to me, and it’s not actually mine, which is, “It’s the same language from code to customer.” I actually think that came from the Intercom engineers. I can’t remember who, but I remember being in a room with a bunch of Intercom engineers who were honestly the best coworkers ever because when I joined, I remember it being like, “Well, the engineers feel like we need someone to help us with naming.” And what a gift, as a content person, to feel like you’ve joined a company where the engineers are the ones who really want to work with you and want to get into the details. I remember having one of my first meetings where we talked about the difference between an app, an integration, a plugin, and a widget, and it’s people geeking out on the semantics of it because that’s meaningful from an engineering perspective as much as it was to me.
That “same language from code to customer” was a goal we had. We wanted to have the clarity that the naming conventions we used in the interface would be the same as we used in the code. It’s really hard because you have to be willing to let go of your legacy a little bit to let the product itself morph, change, and evolve. And I think there is a bit of a perfectionist in everybody who works in product design, whether you’re an engineer or a designer. You have to be willing to let go of that perfectionism in order for change to happen.
“You did often have someone looking at the terminology in the API, looking at the interface, and being like, ‘How do these things fit together?’”
Emmet: I loved it because it broadened out so much what the actual work was. The thing that’s named in the API, which a customer will never see, is the same name as the component that the customer sees and the UI that the customer sees. The customer only sees the surface-level thing, but having that steel thread of an idea carrying all the way through from top to bottom is so valuable internally that it carries through in the clarity you eventually get by the time it reaches the customer.
Elizabeth: It’s a really admirable goal. I think the process of aiming for it is useful even if you don’t get to that perfection. In the first two years I worked at Shopify, I worked on the platform team. Developers were our audience. And the question of what a developer is, especially in Shopify, was really interesting because it was often the same person building the online store. It’s a one-person shop; they’re doing their own development work. And sometimes, it was an agency partner. That’s a very different type of person. And so, you did often have someone looking at the terminology in the API, looking at the interface, and being like, “How do these things fit together?” If you have this expectation that the same human being won’t literally see all of these different… It’s like you’re taking your design and showing it like one of those cross-section books where you can see all the different layers. And they may get their eyes through documentation, on the different sides.
A team of mine worked on the Shopify CLI, which is the command line interface, and that was like, “Take your GUI and turn it into command line tools.” And then, it’s all terminology. It’s such a wonderful, fun thing to deconstruct everything down to its words because that’s what everything’s made of.
The large language model shift
Emmet: You mentioned the industry changes. An interesting thing to note with the timing of your book is you were probably writing it right in the middle of the large language model revolution. What was that like in terms of figuring out what you needed to address there?
Elizabeth: Well, the timing was terrible because I had finished writing it by the time LLMs came out. I wrote it in early 2021. It takes a long time to put a book together. For me, it was a year and a half. A few months after I had done the first draft, we were still doing edits, but you get to the point where adding a whole new chapter would be really difficult. So, I was like, “Hmm, maybe if I’m lucky enough to do a second edition, I would do that.” I referenced it in a couple of places to make it timely.
“There is that first flush of the new technology – how magical will it really be when the rubber hits the road?”
But I was also very aware, having worked on the early bot systems at Intercom, I was sitting in on conversations at Shopify around LLMs, and I was like, “Oh, it feels so familiar.” And so, I was really curious. I don’t feel like I have enough skin in the game as an individual contributor to be able to speak to this. I would love to observe this and maybe work on things like this for the next couple of years and write about it. Because there is that first flush of the new technology – how magical will it really be when the rubber hits the road?
What’s fascinating to me is the same thing as doing the CLI. You are basically taking your entire design experience and turning it into a library of objects, actions, people, and moments, and these were delivered conversationally. What was so fascinating when I worked at Intercom – working even on very simple back-and-forth interactions, capturing email, and that kind of thing – was that you are taking away everything, and all you’re left with is the human and the bot on either side. At Intercom, at the time, it was even more because you had to hand over to the support person.
You’re really talking about human brains, how they work, and what they expect to happen in that moment. You don’t have any of the constructs of, “Well, I have this square or rectangular screen in front of me, and I know that, on the right, I typically see this. And on the left, I’ll typically see that.” That gives the designer so much more power to set the agenda. With conversational design, you give away so much of your power. And so, I’m very interested to see where it goes. I remember reading through the book in a later edit and being like, “Is there anything here that I wouldn’t say if I had been working on an LLM for a year?” And no, I feel like these truths still hold up. But I’m very excited to see where it goes and maybe write more about it.
“So much of design is about conventions and what people grow to expect. I’m interested to see what conventions evolve out of LLMs”
Emmet: I mean, I think a ton of the ideas you have around thinking, ideas, concepts, and how to get everyone aligned around similar concepts are universal. And then, maybe on the writing end of things, even on the tone of voice end of things, that’s where I imagine we have lots of space to play in the next couple of years to figure these things out properly.
Elizabeth: Absolutely. I mean, so much of design is about conventions and what people grow to expect. I’m interested to see what conventions evolve out of LLMs. We always have this idea that it’ll be totally open-ended – you can ask the bot anything, and it will just give you the perfect answer. And I think that will maybe be true at some point. But even if it is true, that doesn’t solve the problem of, “Well, how does the human being know how to frame that question? Or how do you guide them to the right spot if you have no or little-to-no interface?” That’s what I’m interested in. The evolving conventions.
And then, to what extent do the conventions start to trip up the design because they become a tool for advertising or whatever other viable commercial needs a product might have? How does the designer find their way through the human interface relationship with all the conventions that might pop up? Because, if you really look at web design conventions, let alone product design conventions, over the last 10 or 15 years, things have really solidified. And I would say almost congealed into some conventions and patterns that don’t necessarily serve users particularly well. A shakeup would be an amazing thing. But, yeah, I think the next five years in design are going to be really interesting, and LLMs are going to shake things up in interesting ways.
The designer’s toolbox
Emmet: Let’s say I’m a designer, and I’ve spent the last however many years arranging drop-downs and all these conventions of the graphical user interface you’re talking about. Maybe I’m not so confident as a writer – I’ve never gotten into writing blog posts, or I might not be working in my native language, and that’s a bit of a barrier. What advice would you give to designers who are seeing the rising importance of writing as a delivery mechanism for the products or the actual interface for the product? What should they be trying to work on and improve?
“Forget everything you were taught in secondary school about writing. Get rid of punctuation, get rid of anything that’s visual noise”
Elizabeth: This is something where I don’t even know if every content designer agrees with me. I hope they don’t because there should be lots of discussion and debate. I don’t think that when you’re writing for an interface, you’re actually writing. The more you can think of text as a design element, the better off you are. There’s a team I work with at Shopify – we call them the quality crew – and they do these very short-term fixes of patterns that weren’t applied particularly well, or areas of the product that have become bloated, and they’re like, “Let’s make this better.” There’s one designer and one content designer working on that. And what the content designer and all of us have talked about is it’s really an editing job. What you’re trying to do is take stuff away.
If you are looking at an interface and taking text away, you are almost certainly doing the design a favor. It’s actually less about writing and more about removing. That’s a reassuring crutch if you don’t feel writing is your forte. You want to get rid of everything at the punctuation level. Forget everything you were taught in secondary school about writing. Get rid of punctuation, get rid of anything that’s visual noise, stand back from the screen, and look at the text as if it’s just something that fills space. Look at the words that pop out because people are not reading it.
“When you’re thinking about moving through a journey, it’s signposting. You may as well be designing the New York City subway system map”
This has been said since time immemorial, but people are not reading the interface – they’re pattern-finding. They’re looking for specific words. And they’re trying to find handles and doors to move through those doors to the next stage. Find a way to create that distance from yourself so you’re not obsessing over the way it sounds to the ear or the way it’s grammatically constructed. Honestly, try to think about it as if you were someone whose first language wasn’t English, or someone of a lower reading level. That doesn’t mean that beautiful writing can’t exist in interfaces and do a great job. It can, and it should. But when you’re thinking about moving through a journey, it’s signposting. You may as well be designing the New York City subway system map.
I think that people trip themselves up in the same way that I think content designers trying to move into design think, “Oh, I don’t know about color. And I don’t know about fonts and stuff.” They trip themselves up and forget that, actually, the meat of it is about the use of space, hierarchy and sequencing, and what things are grouped together. Those are all things that writers understand. There’s so much thinking we have in common. Don’t be afraid to step outside your realm because the interface is what you’re trying to make. Look at it as the sum of all of its parts instead of obsessing over the tiny like, “Oh, is this the right word exactly?”
It’s really important to understand your product the way an information architect would. The most common problem I find is using one word to describe something over here and a totally different word to describe it over there. We forget that it’s a library. Think of these as tags – you should use the same tag to describe the same thing in two places. Try to think about it three-dimensionally so that as somebody moves through you’re not using “iPhone” over here and calling it a smartphone over there. Consistency is important. But it’s not about consistency with your English teacher’s rules from secondary school – it’s about consistency of the smallest patterns and elements.
“Our brains are trying to tell us we’re doing something three-dimensional. You use the back button. You are trying to pull yourself out of things and move into things”
Emmet: In the spirit of words meaning things, writing is the wrong word for the activity you’re describing because I don’t think reading is the verb that applies to the audience. The audience sees or looks, but they don’t read the way you read a book. When I think of writing, I think of Stephen King hunched over a Smith Corona typewriter writing pages of sentences and paragraphs. And it’s just such a different thing that we’re creating for the reader/viewer. The funny thing is, we’re all aware of how we use the web and how completely attention-deficit our own use of the web is – open a tab, scan it down really quickly, close the tab. And yet, we still design for some imagined, assumed audience who’s going to sit there and read from the top left corner to the bottom right corner of the whole page. It’s just not how it works.
Elizabeth: Yeah, totally. I mean, it’s semiotics. And it’s also very physical, right? I have a mobile team on my team as well as the desktop experience. And it’s really different. The same rules don’t necessarily apply in terms of where we put information or how people absorb it when you’re talking about a mobile screen versus a desktop one. And it’s not just because of the size of it. It’s because of keyboard navigation, point-and-click, tapping, and all the physical interactions you use.
When you are sitting in front of your laptop, yes, we’re all very still, probably too still, but we are also doing something physical. And our brains are trying to tell us we’re doing something three-dimensional. You use the back button. You are trying to pull yourself out of things and move into things. We use a lot of three-dimensional words to describe what we’re doing. I’m very interested to see what things like visionOS and other types of tools will do to interface because it really does make you think about things in a more three-dimensional way. So yeah, you’re right, it isn’t writing. It’s signposting; it’s semiotics. I wish there was a less wonky word to use for it. If you can try to think about it as signs that live in space, you’re doing a better job.
Words for thought
Emmet: What’s the purpose of writing? Maybe often, the purpose of writing is not to be read, it’s actually to get your own ideas down on a page and realize how poorly you understood your idea. In the intro of the book, you say, “As I wrote this book, I was drawing and understanding what it was I wanted to say.” That is also one of the primary benefits of writing. And so, even for that designer thinking, “How do I get started writing? It’s not something I’m comfortable with.” Maybe one way is to just start, write for an audience of one, and see. “I didn’t actually understand my ideas. I thought I did. But then, when I try to elucidate it really clearly, there are new ideas here to follow.” That should be a key part of the design process for designers, PMs, and even engineers. I think the stuff you’re talking about is relevant and even vital, I would say, across the whole product team.
“That’s what we’re talking about – taking the time to think”
Elizabeth: I think that’s true. I talked a lot at the beginning about spending time clarifying your concepts. And writing is a way of clarifying concepts with yourself, right? Being in conversation with yourself. But for that purpose, we sometimes put a lot of store in a deliverable like a glossary with lots of defined terms. Those things are really valuable, but usually, especially if you’re designing something new, it’s more about the conversation you’re having with each other and the process of going through it. It’s not useful if one person goes away and writes a problem statement and is like, “I decided. This is what the concept is.” It has to be a conversation.
I think the writing process can be done honestly or dishonestly. Sometimes, our templates and stuff will lead us to write to fill space like, “Well, I followed the template and wrote down what I think it should be.” And people think it sounds fine and move through. But it’s hard to make your brain actually stop and think about things properly. And that’s what we’re talking about – taking the time to think.
“Every creative process you go through, whether it’s writing a book, making an interface, or architecting a whole product, is a discovery”
I wrote this book three times. I had an outline that was very close to my talk outline. Then, I somehow got in my own head about it. The second time I wrote it, I rewrote it with a completely different outline. And then, I realized that I was right the first time and went back. It’s the freedom to realize that wasn’t wasted time. It was definitely better on the third pass than on the first. And knowing that, when I got to the end of writing the book, I was like, “Oh, now I know how to write a book. I want to go back to the beginning and do it again now that I’ve figured it out.” Every creative process you go through, whether it’s writing a book, making an interface, or architecting a whole product, is a discovery. You have to be willing to let yourself make mistakes to get it right.
Emmet: Yeah, forget LLMs, your next book can be a self-help book that helps people understand what they’re actually thinking. I do think the concepts run deep. It’s tools for thought. There’s an interesting substrate of apps like Roam and Reflect that are pegged as tools for thought, where you get to interlink your tools. And it’s all predicated on that idea that the thought stuff is extremely out there in the ether, and they’re trying to do the hard thing of making it concrete.
Elizabeth: Yeah, 100%. I was constantly being like, “Oh my gosh, this is just way too naval-gaze-y.” And then, my development editor, who helps you with structure and storytelling, turned out to be a poet. And I was like, “This is perfect.” He was not afraid to deal with metaphor. He was like, “No, this is important. What are you actually trying to say?” I have to say, even at Intercom, the whole process of writing for the blog was always such a gift because the editors there are so fantastic. Working with an editor is just an amazing thing. Having someone you could talk to about what you’re trying to get at that can help you clarify your thinking… It was super meta the whole way.
“I really loved pouring 15 years of thinking into [the book]. The question is, ‘Do I need to work for another 15 years to do that again?’ I don’t think so”
Emmet: This is maybe a bit like asking a marathon runner after they cross the finish line, “What’s next, champ,” but, Elizabeth, you finished your book. Do you have any big plans or projects lined up for the next year?
Elizabeth: I want to write another book, but I don’t know what about yet. I really enjoyed it. I really loved pouring 15 years of thinking into it. The question is, “Do I need to work for another 15 years to do that again?” I don’t think so. It demystified the process for me. I’d really love to tackle another topic and write more. I started out in journalism and got so much joy out of writing, and it was wonderful to rediscover that. Other than that, I’m taking a month off and going to Australia this winter, so I’m just going to enjoy myself. And when I come back, in 2024, maybe there’ll be a new project ahead.
Emmet: I look forward to welcoming you back for book tour number two whenever that happens. Elizabeth, thanks a million for coming on, it was brilliant to connect with you. And honestly, it was special to see some of those nascent ideas and see them really encapsulated and come to life in this way. For people out there listening, where could they keep up with you and your work if they want to learn more? And where can they get your book, Design by Definition, published by A Book Apart?
Elizabeth: Yeah, you can order directly from them. And luckily, given that they were very aware that ordering from the UK and Ireland is sometimes expensive, now it’s available through Blackwell’s and on Amazon. So, you can actually get the book more widely than you could before. Just search for Design by Definition. My social presence is a little “to be decided” given the tumult in the social world right now. But I am still on X and Threads and I do write on Medium. Hopefully next year, I’ll be producing more content there. And you can follow me.
Emmet: Amazing. Elizabeth McGuane, thank you so much.
Elizabeth: Thanks, Emmet.
