Can we please focus on what is relevant?
I always wonder, why people get easily distracted when it comes to making a design decision? Well, let me tell you this…
I remember having a client for whom I had to redesign a website. One of the visual features for the new website was a group of small coloured circles joined together with stripped lines behind every image. Something similar to the pattern below.
You have no idea how many times the client was commenting on the colour of these little dots during the meetings which initially aimed for content placement approval.
First, they liked the pattern, but there weren’t sure about the colour.
“Maybe we can have them in multicolour?”
Which I happily changed for the following meeting to hear…
“I am not sure about them being in different colours, maybe we should change them back to one colour?”
Followed by a different person’s opinion from their own team…
“But I like them in multicolour.”
Thankfully I learned that I am not the only one who goes through this. Tom Greever in his book “Articulating Design Decisions” writes about his experience with distracted clients:
On an app for a pharmaceutical company, my client was confused about why she couldn’t understand the Ipsum copy even though she had studied Latin in college. She spent part of the meeting trying to read it aloud, and I had to explain to her why we use Ipsum copy in design.
So why my client couldn’t focus on more important things? Why have they kept changing these little dots over and over again, despite being told that such a thing can be easily changed later and it does not reflect on the content?
The problem is that both, the colour of the dots and Lorem Ipsum were perceived as distractions from what really matters.
A meeting with clients regarding design chances is nothing else than a usability test. We, as designers have to convince our clients or stakeholders to complete a task, usually an agreement to the proposed design. To do so, our clients/stakeholders need their available brain space called cognitive load.
The more options we present to them, the more clutter the decision-making road is, which makes it difficult for them to complete the task. Therefore our job as designers is to reduce these distractions.
So what should I do?
Some designers are making the step forward by removing well know distractions such as colours, images, and icons — and it is a good practice aiming for constructive feedback from your client about things that matter.
The truth is, there is no perfect solution for delivering 100% distraction-free designs. Not until you know your client. However, people can be predictive and they tend to react to the same kind of things every single time.
Tom, in his book, gives us an excellent formula to help us predict our client’s behaviour:
Personality + role / values + observed reactions = predictable behaviour.
Personality comes first, and it is the easiest one to observe. We can gather this information at the early stage of the project, either by meeting your client in person, through call or sometimes, by analysing their tone of voice from exchanged emails.
Role and values are really important because they allow us to understand what is the client’s opinion driven by. Someone who asks about the colour that we have used is going to pay attention to the project’s UI. A developer who is interested in seeing analytics for the project values data to back up our claims. A project executive who is concerned about a call to action being too low on the page needs to know how our choice will reflect on conversions and sales. Therefore, it is important to jump into our client/stakeholder shoes to understand their concerns and points of view.
The last one — Observed reactions, can be picked up during or after the first design meeting. Each participating person can give us unique insights even if they are not involved in the project directly.
All of these combined together will allow us to predict the behaviour of our client/stakeholder, remove any distractions from our designs and focus on what is really important.
Although Tom’s formula may sound simple it requires a lot of practice and patience.
For each person participating in the meeting, ask yourself:
— What does this person care about?
— What is their personal goal within this project?
— What do I already know that they don’t like or may want?
If you are able to answer these questions it means that you already have an idea of what to expect from your clients and stakeholders during the next meeting and how to create your designs without any distractions.
At the end of the day, our presentation flow should be done in the same way that we would create a flow to our users through the application. It is all about understanding the needs of our clients and communicating the ideas in the simplest forms.
