Articulating Design Decisions, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3. Design the Meeting

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Design the Meeting

Ah, meetings! Love them or hate them, they are part of how we get work done. Sure, some companies have so many meetings that it’s unproductive. Others try hard to avoid them for all the right reasons. Call them conversations, sessions, or one-on-ones, if you want. Regardless of your context, people are meeting. Some take place in-person, while others are done remotely. It doesn’t matter if it’s a big conference-room-style presentation or a simple coffee chat to look over your work. The principles are the same regardless of the environment, tools, or fidelity of the conversation.

Think about it the way you might design an interface for task completion. Getting users to complete a task depends partly on their available brain capacity: their cognitive load. The more clutter, options, or roadblocks we put in front of them, the more difficult it is for them to complete the task. It’s the same when meeting with stakeholders. We should try to remove as much of the clutter, options, or roadblocks as possible so that our stakeholders’ brains are freed to focus on the primary task of the meeting: supporting our design decisions. To do this, we have to design our design meetings better.

If they are distracted by an outdated mockup, lack clarity on the goal, or just can’t get their head out of their last meeting, it will be much more ...