The Merholz Agenda
Peter Merholz's semi-weekly newsletter on organization design, design leadership, and bringing humanism into the places we work.
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Bridging the Legibility Gap
By Peter Merholz · · View online →
The last newsletter outlined how Design struggles to be legible within businesses, because so many of its practices (and its most impactful practices) are indeterminate. A common, and reasonable, response was to ask, "How do we make design more legible?"
Before we get specifically to design, it's good to ask ourselves: What are kinds of things can be legible? I believe they are: Practices (how we work), Outputs (artifacts, processes), Outcomes (e.g., measured changes).
Remember, legibility is a condition of the perceiver, not the thing being perceived. As explained in the last newsletter, it was the bureaucratic state which determined that the only legible aspect of the German forest was 'board feet.' Similarly, in many businesses, the primary legible aspect of design is "screens given to engineering."
So, to increase the legibility of UX/Design is to change how it is perceived, which involves two processes:
- better connect the work of design to what is currently legible
- redefine what's legible to include more of the work of design