Design thinking

Inspired by Articulating Design Decisions

Not everything that our stakeholders say will be immediately clear. Sometimes we have to look deeper than their actual words to derive their intended meaning. So another important part of listening to your clients and stakeholders is to hear what isn’t being said. You have to try to understand both what they’ve expressed out loud, as well as what never came out of their mouths. What’s the subtext? What is the elephant in the room that no one really wants to mention? Often what people say and what they mean can be two completely different things.

This might be more important in design than any other field, simply because design is more subjective and people aren’t always sure how to express themselves. Further, your stakeholders realize this is something that you made. You created it. It’s your baby. They

may be sensitive to that fact and try to tell you about a problem they see in indirect ways. Most commonly, people will respond with questions rather than direct disagreement if this is the case. “Oh, that’s interesting. Why did you use the primary call to action here instead of the secondary one?” The subtext might actually be that this person thinks the secondary CTA is a better choice but they just don’t want to come out and say it that way. Any time someone uses the word ‘interesting’ in a response to your designs, that’s a big clue that they disagree with your approach.

People naturally think in terms of solutions rather than first identifying the problem. Because design is visual, it’s much easier to say “Move this button over there” than it is to recognize that the problem is the proximity between the button and the date picker. Other times, people use vague language simply because they don’t know how to express their reaction to a design. When someone says, “There’s way too many colors here! It’s like a rainbow!” what they’re actually expressing is, “The number of colors are distracting and I don’t know where to look or what’s important.” We can help our clients understand the real problem by asking questions and repeating it back to them (in the following sections), but first we have to be on the lookout for this situation.