Articulating Design Decisions, 2nd Edition

Chapter 10. Dealing with Changes

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Dealing with Changes

After everything we’ve covered, I want to be honest and say that sometimes no matter how much we try, we will still need to make changes to our designs that we disagree with. It could be that the people we work with are not willing to budge on their opinions despite our expert suggestions. Or, it’s possible that we just haven’t done a good enough job of making a compelling case for our designs. In this chapter, I propose some options for dealing with changes.

We’ll cover the following:

• Common explanations for why this happens
• Seeing the opportunity in these changes, no matter how terrible they might seem
• Deciding to choose your battles and earning a deposit in the bank account of trust
• Learning to recognize when you’re wrong and correcting yourself
• Setting expectations properly about what our stakeholders can expect going forward

First, let’s talk about why we ended up in this position.

Changes Are the Purpose, Right?

As we noted in the beginning of the book, there is something about design that seems to elicit subjective opinions from everyone. Everyone is a designer! But more than that, the very presentation of our work to nondesigner stakeholders appears to be all about giving them a platform to suggest changes. Often, these meetings have calendar event titles like “Design Review” or we verbally tell our stakeholders that we want their feedback. As a result, they show up with an expectation that telling us something ...