Lists are a Simple yet Powerful Tool for Design and Collaboration

Is this what would happen if Ziggy were about UX? The mysteries of the article banner rapid sketch.

For cultural reasons when I think of the phrase "making a list" I keep thinking about a certain holiday character's list habit. Make lists, check them twice, and use them to decide worthiness. Santa isn't sending enough positive messages about lists.

What's a List Good For?

Lists are low pressure way to write.

What ever comes out of your brain can go on a list. It doesn't need to be a full story or even a full sentence. Keep a list low pressure by letting it be anything. Anything in the universe. Pure chaos. Let order come later. You know Order is going to burst in at some point. Let the ideas have fun for a bit, keep adding them to the list. Order shows up too soon sometimes to stop the chaotic delight of a list of anything. Settle down Order, you'll get your turn.

Lists can build.

Lists are building blocks to make more complex ideas express-able. Lists can be grouped giving more structure areas of concern to see a big idea from multiple perspectives. Lists are growable. Add another idea. Take your time then add some more.

Lists work well in groups of collaborators.

Gather more than one persons ideas in the same list. Now the list represents including more than one voice. Keep going that path and you have ways to explore other points of view both casually and as commitments to do further investigation, research, and learning.

Lists with prompts and points of view go beyond the team to be purposeful about understanding your audiences.

Now you're including more than one voice, gather ideas and learn from more audiences beyond your team. Now we get to the UX stuff. Prompts and points of view can make a list into a powerfully intentional and inclusive tool. Who is involved with your system, service, or product? What do each of those people need? What are you hoping to do for them and with them for your organization's goals?

Consider the example of this blog post:

• Audience 1: readers who are adding UX tools to their main work of art, business, or engineering
  • hoping to encourage using and trying UX tools
  • hope they use lists to include audiences in decisions that benefit both them and your organization
• Audience 2: readers who are primarily UX focused, looking for tools to advocate for design
  • hoping to encourage human centered designers to keep going
  • hope they use ideas, techniques, or quotes from articles like this to help encourage and influence their teams and organizations to include audiences in decisions that benefit both them and your organization

Lists have both UX mindset and skillset harmony.

Deciding to include others is an important start. What can you learn from your audiences to make better decisions that are mutually beneficial? Where do you begin to clarify what to do next?

Try this work session agenda to use prompts and time constraints to create a useful list of audience concerns.

Group Collaboration With Lists Example

Facilitate a 17 minute work session to make lists with your team that includes the needs of your audience. For example let's say your team needs to decide what is the most important research question to learn from next.

1. Warm up. Start with the chaos list. Ask everyone to let the stuff out of their brains for 1 minute. People have purposeful concerns, incidental ideas. Sometimes earworms and other distractions. Now set that aside for fun later. Time to focus.
2. Create a list of audience related concerns like goals, needs, wants, opportunities/problems. Take 2 minutes to generate, 3 minutes to share. Each item should name two things: an audience and a concern they have.
3. Ask what you're seeing emerge from the audience list. Are there themes about audiences mentioned or kinds of concerns gathered? Take 2 minutes to generate, 3 to share.
4. Take 1 minute to group based on what you learned in the prior step. Group in an accountable collaborative way.
5. Is there an important place to start that stands above the other ideas? 1 minute to choose. 2 minutes to share.
6. Return to the chaos lists. Any fun connections? Take 1 minute to find a fun connection, 1 minute to share.
7. Session complete. Quick screen capture or photo of the session output. Share with the group. Use as food for thought in your next round of team work or use as a full commitment to move ahead with what your team wants to learn next.

Lists Help Individuals Too

To Do lists are well known. Folks have lots of ideas and feelings about managing our time and attention for improved executive function and seeing results for our time. Let's set aside to do lists at the moment. Also present me is hoping future me will finish an article draft in progress about those in particular.

I'm close to doing the classic antagonist in a cartoon hand scrubbing gesture of clever planning glee when I offer you a list of reasons for lists and steps for how to make a list for that reason.

• If you're stuck, ask why. Answer that why with a sentence or two. Repeat 5 or more times and you'll have a list digging further into the matter with at least 5 things to consider to help you get unstuck or feel different about your situation.
• If you need to communicate about a bunch of concerns about your product, list the concerns to lower the pressure of writing a huge amount of contextual prose. To group the concerns consider if there's a pattern of who's involved, type of challenge, portion or feature of your product that helps you understand that list of concerns better.
• If you need to name something. Anything. We need names for anything from email subjects to links, buttons, chapters, features, job titles, just about everything has a name or needs a name. Don't stare at the wall until the name wavers into your bleary tired eyes. Make a list of at least 10 options. Better yet try to get to 50 or 100. Lists are a safe way to get out of your comfort zone of go-to concepts. Once you've gathered enough names, read through each and decide which ones are best for the job. Then read through again and reduce the list until you've found the name you need.
• If you're finding conflict in what you're being asked to do. Write down all the things you're being asked to do. Use that to meet with yourself to plan a way to change it or use that list to meet with your client/manager to talk it through. How could you both get what you need? That itself can be a helpful pair of lists: what do you need, what does your client need?

Lists Go Beyond and Turn Into Other Cool Things

Simple lists are a solid useful tool. Grouped lists of lists where each group labeled with clear purpose, that's some powerful stuff. What if you put a list on its side, then group it by events over time? You have a narrative list, a flow of events, maybe you're on your way to creating a User Journey Map.

Adding a dimension like time, space, or both makes lists into one of the top tools in anyone making anything's toolbox. Stories, agendas, goals, routes, inventories, are all creatable things that can start as a list.

Inventories are ultra powerful as a clarifying tool of purpose, ownership, arrangement, curation. Inventories deserve their own post. I'm at the point of writing about lists where I'm fully in the list-matrix seeing everything made of lists. That's probably too far.

• Or.
• Is.
• It.