It’s not your design content that’s getting rejected: it’s your delivery

Use the “Doubtful Stakeholder” exercise to test whether your explanations make sense

Photo by Pavel Danilyuk: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-woman-with-a-doubtful-facial-expression-8637925/

Getting harshly rejected by doubtful stakeholders taught me the importance of translating your work.

I’ve heard it all, from being told, “I talked to the wrong users who didn’t know anything,” to getting polite nods and being told, “Just work on what I tell you, and we’ll tackle that next release.”

While it hurt in the moment, it also taught me a framework for double-checking if what you’re telling your audience makes sense to them.

If you’ve ever had your findings rejected, the problem isn’t always the content you’ve found. The problem is often how you deliver the news.

UX often has a translation problem

UX often runs into communication issues because it deals with qualitative data.

Most people in your organization work with quantitative data. Whether it’s Executives looking at KPIs and Metrics, Sales teams reaching quarterly goals, or Data Scientists doing statistical analysis, many of them have a number-oriented mindset.

On the other hand, UX is one of the few departments that looks at qualitative data and tries to base its recommendations on it. The problem is that bridging the gap between qualitative and quantitative isn’t always easy.

If you were to say something like “3/5 users found task 4 frustrating”, here are all the questions that someone must answer:

• What does “frustrating” mean? Frustration is an emotion, meaning it’s not easily quantified, and no one knows its impact.
• What does 3/5 users mean? That’s a small number of users that you talked to. It’s too small for any statistical analysis (i.e., we can’t say 60% of all users)
• What does task 4 mean? Did you explain to your audience how you broke testing up into specific tasks and what task 4 was about?

This is where a lot of uncertainty comes from, and the first question in particular is what causes your team not to take action. Other people, from the Sales team to Customer…