Articulating Design Decisions, 2nd Edition

Chapter 7. Choose a Message

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Choose a Message

Now that we’re forming our response to stakeholders, let’s take a quick look at what we have so far. Our objective is to get support from them. Our strategy for accomplishing that is to communicate that our design solves a problem, makes it easy for users, and is better than the alternatives. We’ll communicate that using any of the tactics from Chapter 6. So now we need to identify the messages that will help us to employ those tactics in our context.

Although every project is different and every client has unique needs, I’ve found that there are some ways of explaining design decisions that I seem to use over and over again. I often say the same kinds of things to explain my projects, and I’ve compiled them here for reference. Some of them are similar or related to one another, but they should give you a good basis for the kinds of responses that are effective in design discussions.

These are the key messages that you can use to deliver on your strategy and achieve the objective. With our strategy and tactics in mind, find the messages that apply most to your situation and modify them to accommodate your particular context. The goal for this chapter is to give you a list of common ways of describing design decisions that you can use and reuse at each meeting.

I’ve organized them into four categories (in no particular order): ...