UXLx - User Experience Lisbon on YouTube · Open on YouTube
Design rationale, critique and decision records · Proficient · Lesson 78 of 99 · 34 min video, then about 2 hours of practice
Articulating design decisions to stakeholders
After this you can explain a design decision in terms of the listener's goals, anticipate the objection, and turn 'I don't like it' into a discussion of what the design needs to achieve.
Why it matters
Good designs are lost every day to designers who cannot explain them. The skill is translating a decision into the goals of the person asking (the business outcome for an executive, risk and effort for an engineer, user evidence for a researcher) and treating every objection as information about an unstated goal. Focus on listening first, repeating the concern back, and answering with the problem the design solves rather than its visual properties. Trap: defending with taste ('it feels cleaner'). Taste is not an argument anyone else can evaluate.
How to use this resource
A conference talk by the author of the standard book on this subject, 'Articulating Design Decisions'. Published 2018; the content is about people and meetings, and has not dated.