Context:

At Canonical, internal teams often work in highly specialized domains — cloud infrastructure, AI, enterprise support, etc. As a product designer, I frequently saw confusion arise when teams shared updates full of acronyms, assumptions, and product-specific jargon.

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Why?

During a design review, I realized that while I thought I had clearly explained the mental model behind LXD integration in MAAS, my colleagues didn’t follow.

Little did I know, this was how other designers understood my explanation.

Image source: imgur.com/lBBxrh1

In that very same meeting, below was how my colleague explained the concept of Ubuntu Advantage.

Yet, this was how I understood it.

GIF via GIPHY

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Problem?

We work with a lot of complicated concepts:

We had no quick, lightweight way to understand technical concepts outside of our own teams.

Here are some examples of terms that often confuse people outside their teams:

Concepts
SmartNICs
TFA
Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC)
Ceph
Canadisk?

Without shared language, even well-designed features risked being misaligned or miscommunicated.

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Approach

I created /explain — a slash command integrated into Mattermost (our internal chat platform).

Anyone could type:

/explain [term]

It returns a simple, friendly, human-readable explanation of a concept — often sourced from PMs, engineers, or documentation. Think “just enough context” without the Wikipedia rabbit hole.

To build momentum:

• I seeded the database with common terms people struggle with.
• Crowdsourced the definition from internal people who are team experts or Technical Authors.

When the [term] does not exist, someone with the knowledge can contribute to the meaning of that term.

Pro tip

If you have a bad day and you don’t want to learn new concepts, you can type /explain why. This will return jokes from the Unix fortune database bsd-fortune.

(Fortune database from HubTou)

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Outcome

Sometimes the best UX isn’t a screen…it’s helping people understand what’s on it.

• /explain was adopted organically by multiple teams.
• PMs and Engineers contributed to definitions, turning it into a share glossary.
• I helped onboard new hires, spark discussion, and normalize asking What does that mean?

This became more than just a tool, it created a space for learning out loud without slowing anyone down.

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Reflection

This side project reminded me that UX isn’t always about visual, sometimes it’s a cultural design intervention.

By turning misunderstanding into a moment of play and clarity, /explain showed how a small, targeted tool can shift team dynamics, unblock ambiguity, and scale knowledge in distributed environments.

Maybe good design isn’t always about polishing. Sometimes, it’s about lowering the cost of asking a “dumb” question.