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Avoid premature solutions: how to respond when stakeholders ask for certain designs
How to avoid anchoring problems that result in stuck designers
“So, we’re trying to design a table that helps users find exactly what they’re looking for, " The product manager told me, which was more problematic than you might think.
Non-designers suggesting design solutions has been a problem since UX was created in the 1990s, but you might not have understood why this was such a big deal.
After all, it’s just a suggestion from a stakeholder, right? Except that’s not all it is: sometimes, it becomes the anchor that weighs us down as an anchoring problem.
You must reframe these suggestions early to avoid much future pain.
Anchoring problems and one of the fallacies that currently exist
In Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans introduce anchoring problems using the Grand Canyon mule trip example.
“Charlie” wants to explore the Grand Canyon with his family, and he has a specific vision of the experience: exploring it by mule.
The only problem? The mule trips have a weight limit of 200 pounds. So each summer, Charlie tries to diet to hit 200 pounds and fails. The result? He skips going to the Grand Canyon with his family four summers in a row.
You could explore the Grand Canyon by helicopter, on foot, by mule, or in any of a dozen other ways, but because your heart is set on a specific solution, you make the problem much more complicated than it needs to be.
This can happen when you accept a non-designer suggestion for a design solution. While sometimes it might not be that bad, I once worked on a project that had to jump through many hoops because “Derek hated tables.”
Our executive had a design solution in mind for showing the status of an inventory of all devices discovered: Don’t use tables. Use cards.
