How to overcome design by committee
Shift the conversation. Make design decisions based on evidence, not opinions.
Have you ever experienced a design review that went rogue? Everyone in the room has a different opinion about what the design should look like, nobody is happy with what they are seeing. Your design is being pulled apart in every direction, people tell you how to do your job and are endlessly debating wether they prefer the plain or outlined button. What was once a well- though-out solution now looks like Frankenstein’s creature: the perfect compromise between everyone’s opinion. Something that doesn’t feel right anymore and that you have no longer ownership on.
This article is my very personal take on how to avoid this situation based on my experience as an in house designer and UX strategy consultant.
Bad design
Bad design is something useless. Bad design is something that is hard to use and makes people waste time. Bad design doesn’t get the job done. Ultimately, bad design hurts your business.
And design by committee inevitably leads to bad design. As we spend our energy reaching consensus rather than testing our ideas, we loose sight of the big picture by getting caught up in details. Worst, we might give in to feature creep because that’s the easiest (or only) way to get “design approval”.
Design by committee is rarely a single person’s fault. It’s usually the result of a bad design culture. I have seen teams made of smart, experienced and talented professionals loose their focus and take bad design decisions that resulted in more user complaints or business goals unmet.
The fundamental problem hidden behind a design by committee situation is cultural: there is a lack of education about what is the value of design, how it should be used, and how to adopt a productive design process.
Wait, what is the value of design?
A user centric process ensures that our products are:
- useful: we make sure that people actually want and need our service by understanding the problems we are addressing and gauging interest. We help identify our best opportunities to reach our strategic goals.
- usable: we design interfaces that are easy to use, that meet our user’s mental models and that support their desired workflows.
- desirable: we keep customer satisfaction high, make our product stand out of the competition, improve our brand perception.
At the end of the day, design has huge impact on business.
Research indicates that companies with a strong design culture increase their revenues at nearly twice the rate of their industry counterparts” (McKinsey study — 2018)
Give designers the opportunity to join strategic discussions and they will contribute to:
- increase revenues: improve conversion rate, engagement, retention, referrals…
- save costs: reduce customer support and training costs…
The problem with opinions
To be clear: design is a collaborative process. But design by committee is the wrong way to collaborate.
Product managers, engineers, designers and product owners should shape the product all together. Every role has their own unique perspective and using everyone’s expertise in the design process as early as possible is important. Product managers make sure we are moving toward our business objectives and orchestrate team effort. Engineers make sure we come up with feasible, performant and maintainable ideas. Designers make sure that we are building something valuable and desirable. Leadership makes sure all efforts are aligned with the global strategy.
Without an early and continuous collaboration across disciplines, what you have is a waterfall process. No matter how “agile” you think you are.
The problem with opinions is that they are just that: opinions. Hypothesis that are yet to be proven true or false.
Getting alignment and reaching status quo that satisfies everyone (and actually no one) is so draining that there is usually no more time left to test our hypothesis. We release the creature and hope for the best. Pretty risky right?
Let’s have a look at how we can avoid this situation. We can shift the conversation. Make design decisions based on evidence, not opinions.
How to shift the conversation
1. Do your research and share it. Having concrete data and evidence is the best way to keep the conversation focused on what matters.
- Qualitative research: Go talk to your users. Also have a chat with customer support people and sales team.
- Quantitative research: Analyze user behavior through data, request access to analytics tools.
- Stakeholder Interviews: clarify business goals, definition of success, timeline, risks, constraints, integrations/dependences with other teams.
- Competition analysis: have a look what’s out there.
2. Test now, debate later. This is crucial: test early, test often.
I have many times realized during user tests that my team and I have been wasting our time discussing irrelevant details. They might not need the feature in the first place. Or the overall solution we offer doesn’t satisfy them. So why did we spend so much time refining UI patterns and copyrighting?
Testing doesn’t have to be super expensive or time consuming. There are lots of tools and services that gives you quick access to users. Make it a routine, organize lightweight testing sessions regularly (like every 2 weeks), mutualize testing effort with other designers (if your team doesn’t have a researcher) and keep a backlog of what you need to test.
3. Have your key partners closely involved in research. At least your PM buddy. This will help:
- Share context and knowledge early on. You can’t participate to every single discussion impacting design, so you better have well informed partners.
- Get your team to empathize with end users.
- Avoid confirmation bias when interpreting data from research (we all have a tendency to confirm your own ideas).
4. Involve all parties in brainstorm and ideation phases. Invite engineers, PMs and leadership to design studio early on, that’s a powerful way to:
- Build trust with your partners by acknowledging their expertise and opinion matters as much as yours.
- Have better ideas by bringing different perspectives to the table.
- Reduce risks of misalignment.
You might be reluctant to do this if your stakeholders are very opinionated and tend to impose their views, but in my experience, involving them early on, with a strong facilitation during brainstorming session will be more productive than having to defend your ideas with them later down the road.
5. Structure the way you ask for feedback
It’s important to make your partners feel heard, but you also need to prioritize the feedback you receive. So you need to set rules with your team about how and when to give feedback.
- Be very clear and aligned on the project goals: articulate clearly what you are trying to accomplish / solve.
- If the conversation doesn’t support these goals, don’t wait before asking “should we organize a separate discussion for this so that we keep our time today focused on… and achieve … by the end of this meeting?” Parking lot is your friend.
- When people tells you what to do: reverse engineer their ideas. Why do they think “that way” is better? Make them voice out the underlying issue not addressed with current design. There might be a better way to solve it that the one suggested. Also decide together wether this problem needs solving right now or if that’s an edge case for later.
- Restate ideas as hypothesis, and offer ways to measure / test them. “We believe that by doing [this], we will achieve [that]. How could we test that hypothesis?
- If the same people tend to hog the conversation: go for a silent design critique. Demo your ideas, have participants write their questions or feedback, and let the group +1 the most important topics. This might surface important matters that would otherwise not have came up.
Mike Monteiro explained in a brutal talk 13 ways designer’s screw up client presentation. I believe a lot of it is relevant to the way we share design work internally, especially in larger companies.
Some last advices to preserve your sanity
Pick your battles
Design culture won’t change overnight. Focus on the most critical and impactful decisions and let the small stuff go (like an obscure edge case that concerns 1% of your user base, or a tiny UI detail).
Believe in your own skills and expertise.
I have a natural tendency to double guess myself. While being open to feedback is crucial, so is trusting your own expertise and experience.
You are the most qualified person in the room to own design, if people around the table don’t believe that, you can:
- Get support from your leadership to educate about the role of design, create a more productive collaboration flow and develop better feedback processes.
- Be patient and gain trust. Try it their way as well as yours, measure how it performs. Analyze and share results. Decide together how to move forward. Set regular time to reflect on how to improve the collaboration and be more efficient in the future. (1:1s, retros…)
Links
13 ways designers screw up client presentations — Mike Monteiro
The business value of design — McKinsey report
UCD vs UX — Justinmind
