Articulating Design Decisions, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6. Form a Response

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Form a Response

Now that it’s time to actually respond to our stakeholders, we need to take everything we’ve gathered so far and apply it on the spot. Responding to stakeholder feedback is a matter of forming your words in a way that will yield the best response by staying focused on the goal of the meeting: to get support from them and agreement to move forward. To accomplish this goal, we can break down the response into several core parts. That logic will flow together and make it possible for us to present our reasoning in such a way that it will communicate the very best response.

When we communicate with people about design and expect to get their buy-in, it’s no different than other disciplines that desire action from the recipient, such as marketing and advertising, politics, or even military campaigns. There is a pattern we can use to mimic these other communications approaches. As with any good communications plan, we need to have an objective or goal, a strategy for achieving the objective, tactics for delivering the strategy, messaging for employing the tactics, and, finally, a way to elicit a response from the recipient. Each one feeds back into the other to help us accomplish the goal.

In this chapter and the next two chapters, we ...