Talking to people about design might seem like a basic skill, but it can be difficult to do well. And, in many cases, how you communicate with other designers, stakeholders, clients, or executives is more critical than the designs themselves. Based on my book Articulating Design Decisions, these online classes focus on principles, tactics, and actionable methods for helping you present design to other people.
We often learn to develop empathy for the users of our products, but rarely apply the same thinking to the people whose support we need to be successful. We need to develop empathy for our stakeholders, too, if we expect to get the support and buy-in on our projects. Developing stakeholder empathy will enable us to approach them with the right mindset and articulate our design decisions in a way that appeals to their needs.
Our goal with design meetings should be create a focused environment where our stakeholders are more likely to support our decisions. To do this, we have to design our design meetings better by setting the appropriate context, optimizing for memory, removing distractions, anticipating reactions, and bringing in other people who can help.
Responding to design feedback requires you to form your words in a way that will yield the best response by staying focused on the goal of the meeting: to get support and agreement to move forward. To accomplish this, we can break down our response into several core parts. This logic flows together and makes it possible for us to present our reasoning in such a way that it will communicate the very best response.
Anyone who needs to talk about design! Regardless of your role, everyone needs to be better at articulating design decisions. While most attendees are usually designers, I've had many developers, content strategists, product owners, researchers, and business leaders attend. The content, strategies, and exercises easily cross roles.
Yep! It's common for senior designers to say they don't need this. Those same people also tell me how much they learned afterward! Even if you have experience, how often are you applying deliberate effort to improve in this area? You may be a black belt, but every time you step on the mat you have to be practiced and ready.
Great session with Tom Greever today! He just started online classes, and I highly recommend it for all my designer peeps out there. Shoot, anyone! He speaks so much truth and compassion towards others.
Just attended Tom Greever's "Developing Stakeholder Empathy" online class... Tom packed a lot into an hour, somehow balanced speaking with questions and exercises, and we all took away some great exercise templates.
Thanks to Tom Greever for today's webinar about developing empathy for stakeholders. Helpful to think about repurposing design tools we use for understanding users in preparation for any interaction / meeting.
Today I had a pleasure to participate in the training session by Tom Greever on Articulating Design Decisions and I highly recommend it for all UX designers, especially for those working in agencies.
You and your team will get the most from the workshop if you've already read the book or watched the video series from O'Reilly. Here are a few resources to get you started.
