One thing I’ve been able to do in my writing career is… well, write. Perhaps the better way to describe this is to say that I have a knack for not getting stuck in writer’s block.

I didn’t realize this was a skill until a coworker recently asked me about my writing process, and inquired into how I get from zero to finished without many hitches.

(He should see how many unfinished articles I have in my Svbtle queue, but nonetheless…)

I started explaining my process. Usually, my ideas come from a conversation (as an example, see the article you are currently reading). Next, I write what I’m thinking.

I don’t marinate on the idea for very long. I don’t try to fully construct my argument. I don’t map out the sections. I just write, unadulterated and usually raw.

Most of the time I make many references to things that others don’t understand. I’ll make some strange comparisons and synthesize fairly obscure meaning out of thin air. But I write.

Then, I go back, check my headings, rewrite the things that don’t make sense, and if something good comes out? Publish. Iterate.

The truth of the matter is, so many people get caught up on their inability to write cohesively. To write something compelling. We all think a major amount of research is necessary, probably because we’ve been poisoned by academia to believe our own thought isn’t legitimate - that we can only speak from anecdote.

But no one is grading these papers. People read anecdotes. You don’t need to formulate the perfect argument every time you sit down to write. Instead, you absolutely, without fail, must tap into some kind of core human emotion inside of you, and let that emotion inform the flow of your words. Perhaps this is why my best writing comes from conversational topics. My emotions are peaked in conversation, and things that move my emotions are often likely to also move others.

There’s no pride in that necessarily - we are human. Emotions are powerful, and starting your writing in emotion is perfectly viable.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t edit. And edit again. It also doesn’t mean you can rely solely on emotional appeal to prove your argument.

This isn’t about whether or not emotion is a viable alternative to logic or reason, as it certainly isn’t. Emotion guides you towards intuition. When you tap into emotion, words become fluid, and writer’s block seems to stay at bay. You stop second guessing and examining the idea - practices which kill your output - and instead you focus on the fact that you have something to say. Ultimately, if you are a writer, having something to say is the most important skill you can achieve.

Think of your writing as an architect thinks about a new building plan. If you first approach your writing by constructing the technical requirements, toiling over the debate-style point-by-point inspection, you are effectively trying to build the schematics for a building first. Instead, you should cast your vision for the building by painting what you feel it should be. The details of that approximation are fleshed out in editing phase.

Write without the rules in mind. Contradict yourself. Commit every logical fallacy in the book. Allowing your human tendencies to be present in the first phase of writing is incredibly important.

<h2>Why does this work?</h2>

I strongly believe the reason this works is because “writing” isn’t one discernible practice. Instead, it is a collection of practices that should be treated as separate, distinct skills that are combined into a singular super-skill.

Writing is:

- Output: This is what we’re talking about in this article, for the most part. This is where people end up getting “writer’s block”, and is absolutely the primary, most essential part of the writing process.
- Research: Research occurs in so many different ways. For me, research isn’t purely academic. It’s coincidence, experience, and consumption all in one. Research performs two roles as it relates to your writing: informing and validating.
- Editing: Editing occurs throughout the process. We do both simple editing (wherein we correct our “alright"s to "all right"s), as well as complex editing (wherein entire sections are nixed, and the necessity for new sections arises). Editing is informed both by your output and research, but will also affect your output and research significantly.

If you can do the three of these things well, I believe you can write well. What’s more, it takes a massive amount of fluid output to be able to effectively research and edit. If you are experiencing writer’s block, ask yourself these questions:

<ul>
<li>Am I trying to over-validate my idea?</li>
<li>Have I hit a roadblock because I’ve lost my argument along the way?</li>
<li>Should I start fresh, or should I shift modes into editing to re-align myself on the emotional track?</li>
<li>Am I trying to fast-forward to a post-output stage?</li>
<li>Am I actually invested in the idea I’m writing about? Where did the idea come from, and do I care enough to keep writing about it?</li>
<li>Do I believe in my own writing enough to be authoritative on the subject I’ve started authoring?</li>
<li>Am I just trying to avoid a longer editing process by writing it "right the first time”?</li>
</ul>

Answering these questions should help you find a shift in thought that will put you back in the output stage. Never write without authority. Don’t trade emotion for logic. Write with your feelings. Paint your buildings first.

Getting Past Writer’s Block: Break the Rules

I recently encountered an interesting situation with a client. We were talking on the phone about a priority list of features they need on a platform we built; a while into the conversation, they mentioned that they felt like they had already told me all of the problems they were listing.

I was somewhat confused and surprised, because the problems they outlined seemed new to me. Then it hit me.

They had asked for particular features in response to their business problems.

The truth is, business problems require solutions. But it is our job as designers and developers to determine the most usable, maintainable, and effective solution for the platform and user scenarios.

Your clients may often ask you to implement a specific feature. Instead of nodding and pounding on your keyboard, talk about the root problem. Figure out what it is they experience day to day - get a true intuition for the problem, not the desire. Then, and only then, devise a solution better than anything they could do. It’s not their job to solve their own problems. They hire you to do that.

So encourage your clients to share their problems instead of their solutions. This kind of communication is key to effective long-term solutions.

As for the client, we now have a regular call scheduled for them to explain the problems they are experiencing. I then will take their issues and solve them, piece by piece.

Feature Requests vs. Business Problems

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 When you make a design decision, understand that there is no single more important guideline to follow than an equal balance of your own intention and the consumer’s situation.
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</blockquote>

Often, conversations discussing the usability implications of a particular design decision spike on HN/DN, bringing opinions out of the wood work. Whether you are talking about <a href="https://news.layervault.com/stories/2847-why-has-hiding-navigation-menus-behind-icons-suddenly-become-acceptable">the hamburger icon</a> or <a href="http://www.fastcodesign.com/3023690/evidence/snow-fail-do-readers-really-prefer-parallax-web-design">whether parallax is a good idea</a>, the opinions of readers shift wildly.

As I said in a <a href="http://www.creativebloq.com/mobile/whiteboards-all-or-nothing-approach-responsive-web-design-121310191">recent interview</a>, there is no one guiding factor for design. Design is, in many ways, subjective.

Before you usability engineers jump down my throat and describe the difference between art and design, let me go ahead and stop you. Design and art are not two separate things entirely; instead, art is borne of design. An artist designs a particular piece (be it performance, visual, or purely conceptual) with some kind of intent, even if the intent is to be void of intent. And thus, if the intent of a given piece is to communicate pure chaos, then you must throw away any preconceptions of a design approach.

Do excuse me for my grossly obvious post-modernism spiel. As much of a diversion from common web design this may be, this principle holds: the intended message and identity of a given work, in combination with the context of the intended audience, provide the only valid guide for which a designer may make decisions.

And so we arrive at a good, albeit challenging, framework by which to run our design decisions through.

Take, for instance, the save icon.

Does it make sense to use a hard disk to represent “saving” a document? By purely observational standards, with no context, absolutely not. Hard disks have long been gone. It’s roughly akin to using a typewriter to represent a keyboard. Why, then, do we continue to use the save icon?

The answer is fairly simple: contextually, the disk icon means save (maybe even more than it means “disk”) to most users. Of course, we are moving more towards the symbolic understanding of cloud over disk, but all of this is representation.

<img src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ETwjbcA56Vk/UVj7IF0b3VI/AAAAAAAAEzk/ro_3mUmiyWY/s1600/Cloud+Save+Icon.png" alt=""></img>

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 A cloud disk drive, found via Google Image Search. Literally.
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That context helps us understand decisions more accurately.

<h3>Square buttons, flatness, etcetera.</h3>

A coworker of mine recently asked me what the “best practices” are for buttons. I found an article explaining some of those, such as being sure that the buttons “look like buttons”, whatever that means - including the need for rounded edges.

I then changed tabs to Facebook, probably to waste some time, and saw that Facebook had indeed adopted a square button.

Someone’s got it wrong, right?

Not necessarily. The truth is, people evolve. <a href="http://frankchimero.com/intros/quilt/">Frank Chimero</a> explained this evolution beautifully in his brilliant transcript of <a href="http://frankchimero.com/talks/what-screens-want/transcript/">What Screens Want</a>, saying that people use things like clouds and disks and trash cans and other representations (he calls this “padding”) to help them grasp what the functionality of those things are. A button in real life is rarely perfectly square, so why would a button in the digital world be square? The answer is relatively complex, but the short answer is, our brains won’t always need padding. We won’t always need to consider things on our screen to be related to things in the real world, and thus we can grasp the squareness of buttons just fine.

Furthermore, Facebook is quite big. You won’t catch me saying that makes them invincible, but it allows them to push usability standards further. In other words, Facebook users want to post a status, and they will probably figure out how to post a status no matter what shape the button is. They are invested, and Facebook can make huge changes to their platform (or rather small ones, as well) without much of a consequential hit on usability or user engagement. How many times have you heard people complaining about how much they hate the “new Facebook”, only to complain again when it changes again? (It always amuses me that the complains show up on Facebook.) They stayed. The posted statuses. They learned to use new feeds and mini-feeds and, believe it or not, square buttons.

And because of Facebook’s relative audience, we can safely assume that people have a pretty good idea how to use square buttons, now that Facebook has trained them.

<h2>Where it might break down</h2>

We can’t safely assume that people can learn anything, just that they can learn many things. I’d argue that a good number of the design decisions in iOS7 were a bit too far of a jump, too much of a drop in padding if you will, for people to keep their grasp. Sure, we all (read: most of us) probably use iOS 7 perfectly fine, but it certainly hasn’t been a seamless transition. Was it a bad design decision? It depends on the intention of Apple, which I think is to continue being the leader in making things that screens want, rather than only things humans are comfortable with. Apple, like Facebook, can break down a few barriers of design without a large backlash. The backlash comes when you design something that simply doesn’t work (like Maps).

But it’s not just bad directions that can break a design. It’s a bad understanding of humans that can break a design.

I’d label Google Glass’s debut a fairly ineffective launch; it hasn’t done what we as designers wanted it to do. But why? Well, one answer might be that they’re really, really quite awkward to wear for many users. Another might be that they are so unnatural in daily life, that the user couldn’t make the leap to full integration, which is what the device is intended to accomplish. This is a problem solved by time and cultural saturation, most likely, as cell phones and cars and clothing were at one point completely unnatural as well.

<h2>A conclusion</h2>

Be careful with design decisions by remembering who your audience is, and what your intention is for the thing you are designing.

Jonathan Cutrell

Feature Requests vs. Business Problems