Letter to Grandma is a communication and clarity-testing technique that asks a designer or team to explain a product concept, service design, or complex idea in a letter addressed to an elderly relative with no technical background. The constraint is deliberately extreme (stripping away jargon, acronyms, assumed knowledge, and abstraction) and the difficulty of the exercise reveals exactly how clearly a team actually understands what they are building. If you cannot explain it to someone outside the field, you probably do not understand it as well as you think you do.
Letter to Grandma
Explaining your product in plain language to test how well you understand it
A
Designers Academy
9 September 2025 · 3 min read
UXMethods
In brief
The Letter to Grandma method asks designers to explain a product or complex idea in plain language, as if to a non-technical relative, to test how clearly they understand it and ensure team alignment.
