Rules of (stakeholder) engagement for Designers

This article was also published in Bootcamp by UX Collective

During my work, one thing that I think any designers could benefit from, is stakeholder management. Alternatively, as my colleague Guy suggested, stakeholder engagement is a more appropriate term, this is a term that I will use in this article.

Why engagement, rather than management? To me, engagement puts the power into the designer’s hands, allowing us to proactively turn the design into a well-informed, collaborative process that enable better outcomes; while management feels a bit like something we have to do to avoid our work being derailed, not to mention our senior stakeholders probably prefer to be “engaged” rather than “managed”.

Fundamentally, effective stakeholder engagement isn’t far away from the design work we do day to day — know who they are, understanding their needs and what success means to them, a.k.a what makes them look good.

By engaging your stakeholders and establish shared understanding of both your needs and what’s important, you, as a designer, shows up as someone who cares about all it takes to deliver the work. It can also help you to be adequately placed to influence your group or make strategic design decisions, as you have more visibility on what success looks like from different angles.

I’d like to share my learnings that has helped me in my work. While there’s no bullet-proof way to ensure that our design is a success, by applying these, it has helped me build better working relationships with my colleagues, and to achieve more amicable outcomes.

Get to know them

In one of my roles, during my first week my manager gave me a task. To this day, this is a task I still do for the first week — my first week in a new role, a new team, it’s also something I’d suggest to new starters in my team and my mentees to do in their first week.

For this task, my manager gave me a list of colleagues to reach out to and learn about their work.

I dutifully emailed them and set up 1 on 1s with them. During these sessions we got to know each other, I found out more about what they do, and they shared helpful information with me as I’m new.

The knowledge and the relationship I’ve built helped me in several ways

• I learnt more about the moving parts within my wider team as well as the organisation, so that

• I know who I can reach out to when I have a question, or that person will know someone who can help.

• As I moved between projects, sometimes the colleagues I work with in a new project would be people I have already established rapport with. Consequently making building a working relationship sooner.

If it happens to be your first week, once you found out the coffee recommendations, don’t be shy to ask your manager and colleagues about who you should reach out to, and try out these recommendations with them.

Bring them along the way

There was one project that I worked on, over time we pivoted, downscoped and eventually put on hold indefinitely.

In another, we proposed a design uplift that the product team had not considered. It was eventually accepted and the project went live in the end.

What was the difference between the two projects?

In the first one, on reflection, I learned that one possible cause was the senior executives were not aware of the progress. By the time we addressed that by setting up a working group to improve communication and accelerate collaboration, unfortunately it was all too late.

In the second one, as soon as we established the work to be done and how Design can add value to the deliverables. We identified a list of stakeholders we need to keep informed. Through many meetings we discussed scope of change, research to validate the designs, what degree of flexibility we have for design change given development would have to commence in parallel. Our stakeholders had been kept informed all through the research — from planning, research scope, periodic updates to final walkthrough of the results.

The important lesson I learnt was that, when we have an idea, it’s important to bring our team along the way. Particularly with our senior stakeholders, we need to make our intentions clear, make their expectations clear, and make our progress clear. Through constant conversation and feedback loop, Design and Product have shared understanding on what we want to achieve, why we want to do this, and how do we demonstrate value as we progress.

Amongst all your stakeholders, there will be some which would be critical that you bring them along the way, we’ll go through more in the next section.

Not all stakeholders are the same

One of tools that I learnt from stakeholder management training is stakeholder mapping. Often, we have many stakeholders to collaborate with, and that not all stakeholders are the same. But which ones really have the power to impact our project if we don’t engage them early and engage well? For these stakeholders, we need to keep them in close watch and make sure they’re well informed and most of all, satisfied with how the project is going.

A Mendelow’s Matrix (or Power-interest matrix) gives you an overview of your stakeholder and helps you manage your communication and focus on each of them.

An example of a Power-interest matrix. You can access a this version on Miro here

According to the Oxford College of Marketing, the four quadrants in the matrix can be defined as below.

High power, highly interested people (Manage Closely): aim to fully engage these people, making the greatest efforts to satisfy them.

High power, less interested people (Keep Satisfied): put enough work in with these people to keep them satisfied, but not so much that they become bored with your message.

Low power, highly interested people (Keep Informed): adequately inform these people, and talk to them to ensure that no major issues are arising. These audiences can also help point out any areas that could be improved or have been overlooked.

Low power, less interested people (Monitor): don’t bore these stakeholder groups with excessive communication, keep an eye to check if their levels of interest or power change.

There are many variations of the matrix available online. You can set one up in tools such as Miro and share with your internal team to work out your communication plan, such as who to invite to showcases, whose approval is required, to whom a regular email update would suffice.

Don’t be afraid to (over)communicate

It’s always better to over-communicate than under-communicate.

It’ll never hurt to send them an email/a 15min call for quick updates — no trees were harmed in that process.

It’s up to you to explore the level of detail your communication is needed for your stakeholders. Do they need an in-depth walkthrough? A bi-weekly status update? Or they need to be invited to the sprint showcase? Generally, the ones that are closer to the work or from whom I sense there’s less confidence, I’d go with the in-depth walkthrough to address any concerns and get feedback early where possible. Other times, regular status update will suffice. Those who should stay informed but not close to the decision making, inviting them to showcase should do the trick.

Going through a slow patch? If it’s been a few weeks since anything happened. Send them an update anyway to let them know not much has happened, that way they know that the work hasn’t fallen off the radar, and both parties can sync up and address any questions and/or concerns.

Small agreements can lead to big agreement

Is there something you need agreement from a large group of people, or simply a big idea that you’ll need acceptance? What I found useful is to start with a number of conversations in smaller groups.

During these smaller sessions, not only you can communicate and get initial feedback, and work the feedback into something that could gain more agreement. Same goes with the big ideas, having small pre-conversations as a heads-up and getting feedback can prevent unwanted surprises and hard push-backs when presenting to the larger group, it may even open you up to stakeholders that you should consult that you may have previously missed.

Help! My stakeholders can’t agree!

Sometimes, as much as we’re on top of our communications and engagement. Disagreements can still happen. When the decision making comes to a gridlock, here are some ways I’ve used to facilitate an agreement.

Engage both parties — It’s important to understand the intent from both parties. What’s at stake for them if the design go in one direction, or the other? To them, what are the impacts depending on the design direction? Can we analyse and establish these potential implications early on?

At this stage you will also have been in collaboration with these teams, so that you’re clear that no key decisions was made in silos, and pinpoint where a miscommunication may have occurred.

Anchor the design direction — Is there something that all teams would want to achieve out of this, e.g. minimum customer impact, less tech debt, meeting certain deadlines. If there is something among the group, create shared clarity on it. With that we can work towards a common goal, or when opinions diverge, we have the key principles/direction to fall back on.

Define and agree on ownership — some examples

• What platforms and/or services a particular experience spans across, and which team owns each of them?

• Which teams owns certain groups of experiences, i.e. App, web, etc?

• Who owns the UI? Do we use a design system owned by the global design team.

Set intent based on that ownership — Once we agree on the ownership, it works a bit like delegating — each team agrees to lead certain parts, while accepting input from others. In a perfect world, each team that would have principles on what they want to achieve in the areas that they lead and are experts in.

Help facilitate information gathering for decision making — Not everything can be settled in the previous steps. Sometimes groups could feel strongly about something in different ways and we can’t settle. When that happens, we can help provide clarity by presenting information and data to drive decision making. Some ways to do that are

1. Research — can we get some rough idea on what works by running user testing?

2. Analytics — if time and resources allow, can we A/B test this? What data we can capture from the real world to help us make these decisions?

3. Impact assessment — what can we learn from our experts, so that we can share with the group the impact based on decision made — if we do A, this will happen; or if we do B, that will happen. What are the impacts of these decision, and the risk implications?

Closing thoughts

With all this in place, I’m immensely grateful that many people I have worked with have been wonderful people, and together we solved many problems in agreement during my experience. I hope this could help you solve some of your stakeholder dilemmas. Please feel free to connect with me on Linkedin or Twitter.

The Design in business, and the Business in design

Image credit: pch.vector, Freepik

(Originally posted on Medium 4 May 2020)

As designers, we’re inherently motivated to solve problems. In a perfect world, we follow best practices, we run user testing, we review analytics data. Some of us extends this to visually pleasing experiences. Our talent lies in providing delightful solutions to the problems we solve.

What if we just can’t get a solution over the line with our product managers? What if we need to negotiate time or resources to do our testing? What if within the design team, there’re multiple seemingly good solutions for our customers?

This is when as we look at our ideas from a business perspective, not only it helps us make informed design decisions, it helps us influence our stakeholders in such decision making, when decisions are considered from different angles.

At times, this has lead me to making difficult decisions, as I swap my designer hat for my product manager hat. However, often during this process, a few things happen

• I know that I am building a stronger relationship with my product manager, as I empathise with what he/she is trying to achieve

• It has also empowered me to make decisions or pushback accordingly, as I understand the business or operation impact of a design decision

• It has helped me accept rejections on my proposed solutions and negotiate an alternative with my team, after understanding such impact

Whether we’re employed in an organisation or our own business, design is there to help the business grow, and as a result, design can grow within the business as we strengthen the collaboration between the two.

How can design bring value to the business? Or realistically, how can design help business make money, or save money?

It could be that with a design to streamline a product flow, we could increase conversion, retention and revenue for the business, as we improve the user experience and minimise drop offs.

It could be that by reusing an existing pattern or component, we could avoid doubling up engineering and testing efforts and consequently lower production costs for the business, as we promote coherence of UI and interactions across the organisation, as well as maintaining brand identity of the product.

It could be that by adding additional effort in customer communications in new implementation, we could minimise impact to call centres for the business, so our call centre staff can allocate their time to help other customers in need, as we can help our customers to self serve in their own convenience.

This is why it is immensely valuable for designers to understand the values of a business. This understanding will ultimately help us with our design decision making and influence our stakeholders as we empathise their point of view, ultimately bringing well designed solutions with business viability.

Thoughts on Body-Centric Interactions, inspired by Black Mirror

Black Mirror - Endemol UK / Channel 4

(Originally posted on LinkedIn 10 January, 2017)

Over the holiday period I (finally) binge watched Black Mirror, all three seasons of it. Since its first season the show has certainly generated a lot discussion on the where our technology could be heading, the morality and the consequences from how we handle technology.

On the show I observed many examples of body-centric interaction. The characters would use their bodies to interact with the screens – Swipe one way with one's arm to delete or sort a message; slide up on one's phone to pass the screen onto the AR implant in one's eyes.

With the advancements of technology and introduction of new media and platforms, we can't help but to think about how it would affect the domain of experience design.

Can we think of "out of the screen" solutions?

Body-centric interaction will only become increasing popular. Already we can shake our iPhones to cancel typing, we have seen devices with motion sensory input such as Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Kinect plus many more. For now, it is already interesting for us to start thinking about "out of the touchscreen" solutions – How can we incorporate our body during our interaction with the purpose of improving an experience? Is there any existing interaction that we have, that would feel more natural to use our body instead of a button or slider, for example?

Chicken or Egg situation of "natural interactions"

When designing experiences, we instinctively place a lot of importance on our users. We want them to feel that it's almost second-nature or a smooth learning experience from the get-go. As we move onto more body-centric interactions, it's only logical we use the same principles.

It might seem natural if we can just cover our ears to mute the music, but the rest could possibly be a minefield of "what's natural, anyway?" Should our original physical interactions with objects come first and adapt technology back to how our body moves, or by doing so we risk breaking away from our habit of button tapping and screen tapping, creating unfamiliarity in the process, even though such habit is what we created after years of founding ourselves adapting to technology? More than often the answer would vary depending on the media, the experience we're creating and what we're trying to achieve.

Semiotics and Cultural implications

As designers we understand how semiotics and interaction design go hand-in-hand, we have psychologists working on conversational AIs, and in the future we may even see ourselves involved more and more with cultural experts, would someone have to be told that in some countries, we can't use a chin flick to send a file to someone over a video chat?

I think that's something that inspires us to be global minded, culturally aware designers, designing not for "user", but "people". We aspire to do work that enrich other people's lives, and hopefully as we learn about them, it enriches ours.

Snapchat – Designing for Innovation vs Problem Solving

"IMG_4334" by Joe Loong. Licensed under CC BY 2.0

(Originally posted on LinkedIn 27 December, 2016)

I'm a regular Snapchat user, I use it to keep in touch with my friends around the world. I think the principle works great, the self-destructing nature of the snaps allows us to take silly shots to our hearts content, without having to worry about them cluttering our phones. 

One thing I still have reservations about, is its interface, its interaction pattern, or the seemingly lack-of. Perhaps I'm getting old, I can debate for ages on how I question the pattern of swiping in all directions to go to different parts of the app, or it took me weeks to work out how to exit out of a news article. But what I find more intriguing is that, it's true that I dislike the interface, what keeps me going back? 

How an app that that hasn't been the best experience for me and possibly, for others, did not let this hinder the product's phenomenal growth? Seeing Snapchat's success, what should we consider in our design process to allow innovation to thrive and solving experience problems equally?

Product direction

As a designer, it's beneficial to speak to our product managers on where do we see the product is heading. Do we see more innovation in the future, or we have a problem that we need to solve first?

Snapchat is about fun experiences, their facial recognition filters excels in the domain of social media apps. Its interface might not be intuitive to everyone. But if the objective is to create something fun and out of the box, then the goal is achieved.

It’s exciting to design something that inspire user to discover new interactions, new way to do things. The swipe phenomenon from Tinder is a good example. However at the same time it is important that we ask ourselves constantly "why", and "is the new way a better way" – does the current experience quench the thirst of our users, is it ok to reuse what we have, rather than creating new elements for the sake of it?

Demographic

Snapchat’s success is built upon its demographic’s openness to new interaction patterns. To their younger users, the priority is to share fun experience with their friends. Additionally being keen learners than other demographic, they're more likely to learn a new interaction to archive their goals, instead of dismissing the whole thing as a bad experience. 

By contrast, for the demographic that is more resilient to change, it would be better to start on helping them to get to what they need. A better way to introduce change would be in smaller bits, in order to maintain the familiarity.

It will always be beneficial to take a more holistic approach in the design process. By understanding the needs from our product team as well as our customers, it can help us choose better on what we need to solve, and hopefully we can nurture both innovation and great experience at the same time.