How to Deal with People Who Don’t “Get” Design — Design and Strategy

A practical guide on minding other people’s business 😇

Morgane Peng
UX Collective
Published in
5 min readSep 10, 2019

As designers, we often complain that non-designers don’t “get Design”. The reality is a little bit more complex.

To make sure Design is used strategically, you need a strategy. This was the topic of my talk this year at the UX Days conference in Paris and here’s a recap, with a little bonus game at the end!

Can you make it pretty? Can you do the “UX”? Can you add a wow effect?… I asked the audience to raise their hands if they’ve ever encountered these upsetting questions at work. The picture speaks for itself — UX Days Conference 2019 by FLUPA

By setting up the design team in a 150-year-old company and discussing with my peers from startups, agencies and even from companies like Google, I realized that when approaching non-designers, we often share the same frustrations.

Can we do anything about it? Yes of course!

The Design Scream

My secret: I used to be on the other side — on the business side. So I can relate and admit that there is no one fits all solution. In this post, I’ll use fictional characters to illustrate each type of problems.

Meet Jean, Paul and Audrey!

For each of them, I’ll share 3 strategies that worked for me and could work for you — watch the video version for the full analysis and real-life anecdotes.

Let’s start with Hostile Jean.

Hostile Jean does not get the point of being user-centric. His business is complex, so the screens are rightfully complicated. Users who make mistakes need more training (more about the expert mentality problem here).

This is a problem of culture.

To change Jean’s mental model and make him care about design methodologies, don’t attack him with big studies and numbers, try to:

  • Get a foot in the door: start with small requests or questions and ask for more step by step.
  • Use the bandwagon effect: mention what others close to Jean are doing.
  • Adopt a crab attitude: find something that makes Jean suffer as a user to deflect the explanation and allow Jean to be less sensitive, more rational about why his application needs design improvements.

Contemptuous Paul acknowledges that a good design approach is necessary but doesn’t really know how to make it work — even in his agile process. Why can’t we do a bit of UX at the beginning? Or at the end? Let’s quickly train someone or hire a trainee?

This is a problem of organization, perfectly illustrated in this meme:

Source: Internet meme

To balance the forces, try to:

  • Standardize your procedures: define your methodologies and call out “not compliant” projects
  • Standardize your qualifications: define the skills and specific tasks that each stakeholder in the project performs — specifically the role of the designer!
  • Speak the language of the company: don’t use design jargon and fancy words, instead use adopt the company’s expressions to make your explanations more accessible

Manipulator Audrey really welcomes design, however not for the end-users’ benefits. She wants to use design more as a selling point and to engage stakeholders in presentations and projects.

This is a problem of business, where design has deviated from its original purpose. And the risk, well, is this:

To avoid this trap, again, 3 strategies:

  • Learn the business: designers that genuinely understand their business have a positive impact on the whole project lifecycle (more in this post). It can be very tempting to redesign a tool without considering its purpose. Become business-aware to recognize these situations and call them out.
  • Be an ally, not a resource: adapt your design process and align it to the business strategy. For example at Societe Generale, opening our systems is a priority (you may have heard of Open Banking). That’s why the design team asks for the architecture and APIs on projects, so we can both design using real data and push this strategy.
  • Be part of the solution: use design to solve business challenges. As designers, you have the power to design and prevent deviant behaviours before they endanger your users and your company.

Does this post change your perception of the challenges faced by designers?

Next time you hear upsetting questions or comments, take a breath.

The person in front of you doesn’t necessarily have bad-intentions; maybe it’s just a problem of culture, organization or business.

These strategies create a positive environment not only for the designers but also for the Jeans, Pauls and Audreys. They also worked for us to get a seat at the table (and keep it!) at Societe Generale.

Replays, slides and bingo!

You can watch a 20-min recap video on YouTube in English or in French, or get all the slides on SpeakerDeck.

Here’s also a bingo to do at home, or with your team 🤭.

My inspirations

Written by Morgane Peng

Blending user experience design with business strategy in the financial space. Also into indie game dev. @morganepeng

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