While attending the SXSW Interactive Festival this year I was fortunate enough to catch the panel with Jason Santa Maria and Rob Weychert both of Happy Cog. They went over how they handle going through a design critique with a client. They presented some great material and good ideas about how to successfully navigate these kinds of meetings. Here’s what I took away from it — paraphrased and taken from my scratchy notes.

Catch the video podcast here.

Design strategy

Establish a goal for the meeting. When you leave, what will be the outcome of the meeting? For example, is it to discuss a certain feature or is to decide which design will be used?

You need to make good use of your time. It sucks to leave a meeting having less clarity than when you went in.

Focus on problems NOT solutions

When it comes to discussing the design it is very important that the discussion remains focused on what the problems are and not what the solutions are. It is human nature to want to offer up potential solutions to what the problems are. The fact remains is the design is there to solve problems — provide the solutions. The best place to do this is outside of a meeting with good feedback from you client as to what the problems are with the proposed solution.

Holistic design

Holistic — characterized by comprehension of the parts of something as intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole.

This one one really hit home because it is important to let the client know that each design is separate and should be treated as such. They mentioned that separate designs should NOT be treated like a buffet — where the client chooses separate elements from each comp. This also goes right back into focus on the problems not the solutions from above.

The walkthrough

Great advice about introducing your designs: Introduce them as you would your friends.

It only makes sense as you have spent time and energy thinking about the possible solutions to the design problems. Give them personalities. Get them excited about meeting (seeing) them.

Keep the discussion moving

Leave no child behind — Go through each and every design and discuss them all.

Stay problem focused and do not commit to changes in the meeting. Take it away and think about it, discuss, then propose solutions to the problems later on – again the problem focused approach.

Beware the Frankestein Monster — Once each of the designs has been reviewed remember that each design is holistic. Do not pull elements from each of the designs to make one complete one – aka Frankenstein. Capture what is wrong with each design then take it away and find the solution.

Keep in Mind

• Perspectives vary from person to person
• Don’t take it personally
• Stay positive (don’t get combative)
• Avoid jargon – I liked this point as I think it is crucial in making people feel comforatable that jargon is avoided so everyone is included in the conversation.
• Find common ground – hard to do sometimes but it is there. I think that it can be found particularily if you stick with a problem focused approach.

Top Five Client Requests

• My unqualified friend has different ideas
• Purple is my favorite color – why don’t you use that? (helpful to have personas from early IA studies as well as user stories)
• We need more stuff above the fold – Good point made here by Rob is that computers are NOT newspapers; there is no fold. Study after study has proven that people do not mind scrolling.
• There’s so much empty space — can’t you fill it up?
• Wait-for-it … Make the logo bigger.

After the meeting

• Evalute your data
• Make sure your changes have a plan
• Document everything
• Follow it up and do it

All in all a good discussion about what can sometimes be a challenging situation.