Communicating your designs to stakeholders
In Articulating Design Decisions, Tom Greever argues that how you communicate your work with stakeholders, clients, and other non-designers is more critical than the designs themselves. Communication is inevitable in design, yet a lot of designers seem to believe that it isn’t necessary. A common theme you hear is “If a design is good, it should be able to speak for itself ”.
Although this argument might be valid if you’re designing for yourself, it’s not always the case when you’re designing a product you don’t own.
Enter the world of shared ownership and cross-collaboration
When crafting great experiences for users, designers are constantly aligning with stakeholders, collaborating with product managers, or making trade-offs with engineers and these individuals are in the position to determine what gets shipped and what doesn’t.
Who are stakeholders?
Stakeholders are people, groups, or individuals with an interest in a project and can influence its success. They may range from the head of the organization to the chief product officer or sometimes senior designers and engineers in the company.
It is important to identify stakeholders in a project as early as possible so you’re able to align on goals and expectations.
Why is it important to successfully communicate designs to stakeholders?
You can spend time designing the best-looking app/website with sleek animations, state-of-the-art drop shadows, and colorful gradients; but if you’re not able to communicate your design decisions in a way that’s compelling and convincing to stakeholders, you’re indirectly making the argument that your design may not be the best way to solve the problem and since stakeholders can influence the project, you may be asked to go back to the drawing board and come up with more explorations.
This usually comes with the well-known ripple effect of starting over which can include: extension of timelines, reprioritizing efforts, and just the sheer frustration of having to start a process all over again.
Now that we understand how the success of our design is largely dependent on how well we can communicate our designs to stakeholders, let’s walk through two steps to ensure success.
Step 1: Establishing the big three
Before meeting with stakeholders, the first and the most important thing is to ensure your design satisfies three conditions:
- It solves a problem
This could be business problems like audience engagements on a particular product, conversion, or user problems like discoverability, accessibility, etc.
Find a solution to the problem and a way to measure its success. The best way to know if you’ve solved a problem is by testing it with users to validate and comparing the metrics before and after implementing the solution and then observing it over time.
It is always advisable to communicate your proposed solutions early to all team members to ensure everyone is aligned on the right problem being solved and can also address potential constraints ahead of time.
- It’s usable
“The design is not just what it looks like and feels like. The design is how it works” — Steve Jobs
The best-designed product would be useless if it’s not usable. First, you need to ask the question: “How easy would it be for the user?” You can answer this question by testing your wireframes with users and observing how easy/hard it is to use your product.
Another question you need to answer is: “How can I prove to stakeholders that it was easy for the user?” You can prove this by presenting data from your usability tests.
- It’s the best option out of all your explorations
It is usually easier to convince stakeholders that one design works better by explaining why others don’t. It gets a bit challenging when you try to convince them that the only solution you explored works best. Make a list of other explorations you tried and be ready to present them to stakeholders.
Step 2: Communicating the big three
To ensure your designs are successful, you need to get support from stakeholders and to get support from stakeholders, you must be able to effectively communicate how your design answers three similar questions.
- What problem does it solve for the user and the business? Clearly explain the problem your design solves for the business and for your users and what both parties stand to gain from your solution.
- How does it affect the user? Do your users feel empowered after using your designs? How does your design affect their everyday lives? Are they able to achieve their goals using your designs? Articulating how your designs can potentially affect your users demonstrates empathy and builds trust in your abilities to deliver the right solution.
- Why is it the best option out of all explorations? It’s advisable to keep the design explorations you tried before arriving at the final solution because you might need them to prove that your final solution works better than the rest. Maybe your initial explorations did not test well with users or maybe you had to make certain trade-offs with engineering to accommodate build time. Either way, keep your explorations because they’ll be useful to answer this question.
Making your case with these steps will not only ensure support from stakeholders but would also improve your communication skills.
Part of getting support from stakeholders may include some questions about your design decisions and feedback on your work, so it’s crucial to be prepared. In our next post, we’ll talk about how to handle design feedback from stakeholders.
