It’s much easier to keep the conversation moving forward if you have these alternatives to discuss rather than trying to address new ideas and suggestions on the spot. This demonstrates that you value everyone’s time by only showing them the important parts while also giving them the opportunity to participate in a real user session. Occasionally, what our stakeholders want us to do will go against the technical or social standards we’ve set for our application.

You want this person to be your representative, to feel confident in their ability to support you, and to agree that your solutions are the best. If we make the change you’re proposing, it will break that flow on step 3 and cause the user to have to stop and go back, rather than quickly completing the step by moving forward. It can be difficult to know with certainty how a particular design will affect your goals, especially for smaller interactions that might not affect the overall use of the entire application. Now that you understand your stakeholders, have removed the distractions, anticipated their reactions, and gathered a group of people to back you up, it’s time to go through the meeting step by step, practice your presentation, and prep everyone involved.

For some people, you might not know the answer to these questions because their participation is unclear. You need to have confidence that your experience leads you to believe with all reasonable certainty that this design is at least one step of a larger approach that will take you where you need to go.

I often don’t even know this has happened until I am talking to stakeholders and parsing through my decision process on the spot. In those cases, you have to decide how important their input is and engage them at an appropriate level. We need to communicate that we’re not only putting things on the page in a way that looks good, but that we’re trying to draw users into the application and lead them to action with an appropriate placement of design elements. As Greever relates his experiences with design meetings, it becomes apparent that many design meetings focus on the wrong things.

A daily meeting with your boss will require less, but it’s still a good idea if there are issues that might be difficult to discuss or if you’re unsure how you might say it. My wireframes were a little messy because, well, they’re just wireframes: quick and dirty, just enough to communicate the intent, right? To that end, understanding our stakeholders would be of little use if we didn’t use that knowledge to break down these barriers and make our meetings more usable. Articulate your design decisions using UXPin Merge to create high-quality interactive prototypes that accurately replicate the final-product experience.