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This article is an overview of how to deliver completed designs to other teams or stakeholders in the highest levels of design. ~ Dean Kosage

One of the most common misconceptions about director/architect-level designers is they do less work (produce fewer wireframes, specifications, etc.) than junior-level designers. In fact, their work is more complex than people initially imagine when starting out in the field. You have to balance many ideas, requirements, and people, and have to make independent decisions that will cost thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars. The buck stops with you. This is a level of responsibility you have to endure, if not enjoy, to thrive in higher-level design.

When I was an entry-level designer, I would be handed various interaction design problems and asked for a solution. I would then present three or four solutions to my immediate managers and be done until the next such request. I was always curious what happened after I handed it off. I came to realize that there were several more handoffs, each getting more precise and more fierce as it moved up the chain of command. Different teams would have to get involved, then team leaders, then finally stakeholders, each giving opinions on changes, personal ideas, and ways to try and cut costs. The balancing act that you must do for that is beyond the scope of this article, but I will try to help you deliver the best possible solution you can.

I am not going to explain details of design process, because you likely have one of your own, your team’s, or your company’s. I’ll specifically tackle how to walk into a large meeting to present deliverables and get the best reception possible.

I should also add that my experience is with large corporations, such as Microsoft and Apple. How I present ideas to colleagues may be very different than how a vendor or a design agency would present an idea. My strategies for delivering designs are meant to influence a set of peers to maintain the best possible experience for the user. Your focus should be entirely on what’s best for the customer.

Share Documents in Advance

The importance of this step is to help them prepare for the meeting. It’s bad form or just bad judgment to introduce a new idea or direction in a large meeting without proper warning. The initial kneejerk reaction will most likely be negative. Resistance to change is inherent. It’s better to give them as much preparation material as possible to facilitate a speedier meeting. You’ll be able to presume understanding of the concepts or reference the materials you have sent out during the meeting with more confidence. I like to include past UX testing findings with notations. This lets me speak directly about the customers’ needs when discussing solutions: “As you can see, six out of seven customers were searching for a way to do X. This pushed us to design a solution for X.” Also remember at the beginning of the meeting to make sure everyone got the materials and to ask if anyone had any questions.

Some examples of documents that I have given out prior to meetings:

• UX findings, executive-level summaries (two to three sentences discussing the results of an entire testing round)
• Excerpts from books describing certain design ideas or thoughts (one in particular I have given out several times is Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice)
• Links to or wireframes of past designs and findings, or conclusions gotten from those designs
• Links to TED talks (Barry Schwartz gives a great one)
• HTML/Flash/WPF prototypes in a ZIP so they can play with them before they see them in your presentation
• Sketches or drawings of past designs
• Links to specific points in videos of UX Testing for particular quotes

Know Your Colleagues

Be familiar with each of the personalities in the room, and why are each of them has been invited to the presentation. Determine the roles of each member and make a mental note of the history your design team has had with them. Try to anticipate what each person might challenge you with. Think through questions that each may ask and try to determine if there will be any “gotcha” moments beforehand.

At Microsoft, from my recollection, approximately 50% of the employees have a title that’s some variation of “program manager,” or PM. This is a very general job title and can represent so many different types of roles. The PMs I usually came into contact with were software PMs, whose job is to watch the money. They keep track of the timelines, the budget, and generally keep an eye on all the different teams working on a particular feature set. They ensure everyone is working as hard as they can and that we finish on time and on budget.

When presenting to a group of PMs and developers a significant change to current thinking or process, the reactions will be varied. Many things are on the minds of the participants, including timeline, amount of code, impact on the customer, impact of the footprint (memory or cycles), etc. The developers may invite the challenge of trying to come up with something ingenious to solve the problem of developing your solution, but the PMs may want to keep resource utilization to a minimum. Conversely, the developers might not want to get that deep into the code for something they see as arbitrary and unnecessary because it will have a low customer impact, while the PMs push for more “wow” moments. This is why it’s important to understand where each of the meeting participants is coming from. If one of the PMs is constantly fretting about deadlines, be prepared to speak directly to how your designs will actually affect the deadline.

Do Your Homework

It’s also worth investigating whether there is any company history that might bear on your work if this is an ongoing version of a product with significant development history. Has this particular solution been tried before and failed? If it did fail, be prepared to speak to that history and how your solution is different and an improvement. Be specific. Have all raw notes, summaries, and findings from user testing ready to go. Be prepared to deep dive into the results as much as you need to be. Be able to cite specific testing answers if need be; more times than not, it’s very useful. I have found that when PMs or developers don’t want to do a particular piece of a design—perhaps because of the number of hours it will take or its perceived risk to the stability of the build—they will hammer it incessantly, challenging the thought process, the reasoning, or the design process. These concerns are easier to respond to when you have user testing results ready at hand, and have organized them in a way that anticipates how you might need to use them to respond to concerns.

When you start designing a particular feature or add-on to a product, remember that you are not the first. There should be a massive amount of documentation on why the designers got to the point you are at now. If you were designing for Microsoft Office Help, for example, you would not expect to go in fresh. There is a massive amount of documentation, designs, test results, and other political/corporate decisions that went into where it lies.

Before presenting some new and interesting feature or add-on, always make sure that you have researched the history behind it first. Talk to some of the senior people; do they have any recollection of that particular feature ever being introduced? Can they recall any unwritten corporate decisions, legal problems, or technical issues that led to its currently not being implemented? Research the idea or feature to the best of your ability to help prepare yourself for speaking to why it should be implemented now if it wasn’t in the past.

Understand the Technical and Engineering Requirements

Be friendly with developers. They are not your enemy (most of the time). Developers are fearful of designers’ ability to create thousands of lines of code with a simple sketch. So instead of approaching your design work simply from a designer’s standpoint, approach it as someone who would also have to build it. Whatever you get approved, someone is going to have to labor over to actually implement.

Be precise and be exact if your aim is to get full sign-off on a design. If you don’t get this detailed in your review, expect to have to do another review when you do. Do not go into a meeting and describe a “slow animation that sweeps from the left;” do go into a meeting and say, “The animation begins and lasts for 0.3 seconds, and here are four slides, from 0 to 0.1 to 0.2 to 0.3 and the resting state at 0.4.” But even this isn’t enough. Make sure you have talked to a developer first to see if this can even be implemented in the manner that you want it to be.

Understand the overall system ramifications of your design are beyond the scope of this article, but I would suggest you gain a familiarity with all the workings of your particular application or solution have on whatever system it may be running on. This includes, but it not limited to, the variables that are changing hands, the memory load, the machine cycles, the net connections, etc. Try to understand as much as you possibly can before asking the next level of stakeholders. What is the effect on the rest of the application or experience? You don’t want the entire experience to pay a tax (in whatever machination that may come in the form of) for a small feature that it shouldn’t have to pay.

Conducting the Meeting

At the start of the meeting, explain the goals for the meeting and what you want everyone to get from it. What you’d ideally like is universal buy-in and strong approval for your design so it can get sent to production, but if you don’t get that, don’t freak out. If you do get rejected, try to understand everything you can about why you got rejected. What were the specific points that supported their criticism? Can you fix them? Take critique well. Remember that arriving at a solution is not easy, especially when you’re working with larger and more complex systems. You may get approval for 90% of the design, but stakeholders might request tweaks or different variations on particular details. This is the easy part. Tweak or do these variations in quantity—three or four of each—and present them to a smaller audience, sometimes only the dissenters. This should help you get to the next level. Iteration is part of the process. I have personally gone through 8-10 design iterations on a particular feature before I finally got approval. Don’t think of it as 20% rejection, think of it as 80% approval!

Some additional tips for running the presentation:

1. Try to keep questions until the end of the presentation, remembering to leave ample time for questions and challenges. Depending on how radical, new, or complex your solution is, be prepared to spend a larger portion of the meeting receiving and responding to feedback.
2. If you get challenged, ask questions. Try to understand exactly what they are saying and understand their reasoning. Also try to make sure everyone else in the room understands it. This is very important if you need to explain the challenge to your team after the meeting.
3. Answer direct questions directly. If you do not know the answer, say, “I’ll find out and get back to you.” Then get back to them with an answer soon after the meeting.
4. Answer direct challenges directly with all relevant documentation. If you don’t have it, do not try to persuade them with vague answers. Tell them what you have, why you made the decision, and let it stand on its own two feet. Do not get defensive beyond reason. If something is challenged, explain how you got there and let it rest. Do not repeat yourself (this is rule #1, as repeating yourself will make others feel talked-down to). Do not defend the solution like it is you personally. Do not fumble for answers. If you can’t answer the challenge directly, respond with “I’ll find out for you.” Letting feedback get to you personally is unprofessional. You are not an artist delivering a masterpiece.
5. You may encounter unreasonable challenges and you can get “edge-cased to death,” which is what I call it when people try to kill things with the most unreasonable of problems. I also call this the “one-armed man in Uganda” challenge. I actually had someone bring up a one-armed man in Uganda as a possible customer and therefore we needed to think of him when designing a solution. This can be extremely frustrating, but if you have critically thought-out your design beforehand, you will be prepared.
6. Though you may feel you have answered someone’s question or challenge completely, ask the person if he feels you’ve completely answered his question. Just because you think it answered it does not mean you have.
7. Be transparent about the entire process you took getting to the design. Have slides ready showing testing subjects, iterations, sketches, and any other materials that you may have collected along the way.
8. Address problems with the design honestly. Be transparent about all the things that have given you headaches over the course of the project. Helping people understand the journey you’ve been on helps them respect the destination all the more.
9. Talk about the user or the customer directly. Your job is to ensure the user has a great experience, not to make the developers happy. As you move up the ladder of stakeholders, you will find a common trait: they all care what customers think. Speaking directly to how designs affect customers will keep the conversation rooted in your sole purpose, to make the customer happy on all levels.

Always remember to do what is best for the user. You aren’t there to make your colleagues happy or sad. In the end, you all have the same goal. You all want to make the customers happy and create a piece of software that you are proud of. This can be one of the hardest parts of working in the UX field. Trying to be a voice for the user’s point of view in decision-making. Senior colleagues will all have their own ideas what is best, so use the user’s perspective as an objective frame of reference for responding to them. Don’t explain things in terms of your own opinion; rather, speak in terms of the user. Don’t say, “I picked this because it was a cool design;” instead say, “We chose this design because it tested amazingly well with current/future/target customers.”

Closing the Meeting

Aftermath

An Unspoken Truth

I cannot emphasize this enough. By leaving strategic holes in your design and allowing others to come up with conclusions or obvious fillers, it reinforces their own personal stake in the design. This will get them personally involved in the approval process as one of your biggest advocates, since they’ll equate defense of your ideas with defense of their own. This whole idea is rather sketchy, so use it with caution. You will be giving up some ownership of your design, but in the end remember your goal is to make the best experience for the user. It’s about them, not us.

More Wonderful Posts of Dean Kosage…

• Dean Kosage’s Lifestream
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Facebook has been hit with a lawsuit over a trademark dispute surrounding the new Facebook Timeline profiles.

Timelines.com asserts that if Facebook is allowed to move forward with the launch of Timeline, it “will essentially eliminate Timelines.com” and cause mass confusion that Timelines.com is affiliated with Facebook.

Facebook Timeline, a feature that was unveiled last week and will be rolled out over the coming weeks, transforms the Facebook user profile into a virtual scrapbook that lays out your digital history.

Timelines.com, on the other hand, lets users view and create multimedia timelines for historical events such as the American Civil War or the rise of Apple, Inc. The five-year-old site partners with The Boston Globe and other media organizations in order to create timelines for different sports teams. It also happens to own the U.S. trademarks for “Timelines,” “Timelines.com” and “Timelines&design.”

Timelines.com alleges that Facebook’s launch of Timeline infringes upon its trademarks. Not only that, but the company alleges that the social network destroyed its Facebook Page (http://facebook.com/timelines) in favor of a redirect to an introduction page about Facebook’s new user profile pages. Timelines.com’s Page appeared to be working normally though as of Friday afternoon.

From the court complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for Chicago:

Facebook’s use of the term “Timeline,” and its redirection of Internet traffic from Timelines’ Facebook page to Facebook’s new “Timeline” offering, infringes on Timelines’ federally registered trademarks in that it causes confusion as to the source of the services offered to users of the Internet. Indeed, Facebook’s “Timeline” offering and its misdirection of users attempting to access Timelines’ offering is intended to prevent Internet users from accessing information about Timelines.com and to allow users to instead use Facebook’s “Timeline” offering.

Facebook has dealt with many lawsuits in its young life (many of them from the Winklevoss twins), but this one might present a challenge to the social network.

Facebook Timeline: In-Depth

When we type a word into google, we generally don’t think about how much companies pay to ensure that word generates their ads at the top of the search results.  Thanks to a study conducted by Wordstream, a company whose software helps users create search engine marketing campaigns, we now know which keywords garner the highest costs per click (CPC for those in the know) in Google AdWords. For over a decade Google’s AdWords solution has allowed companies to create ad campaigns on google’s search results and participating websites and bid on which keywords lead users to those campaigns.  Considering advertising makes up 97% of Google’s total revenue, or 33.3 billion dollars a year, selling these keywords is an integral part of Google’s business model.

Wordstream, a pay-per-click software company, recently study compiled the top 10,000 keywords into categories by weighting the number of keywords within each category and the estimated monthly search volume and average cost per click for each keyword.  The results aren’t as exciting as the most searched for keywords on google, (which mostly involve celebrity scandals, current events, and the weather) but they still reveal some interesting trends.

Insurance – $54.31 per click

It turns out ‘insurance’ ranks number one for CPC.  That in itself is an astonishing number considering the millions of people who see these ads every day.  Keywords in this category include ‘auto price quotes’

Loans – $44.28 per click

Following close behind are ‘loans’, a category that includes ‘consolidate’, ‘graduate’, and ‘student’.  The emerging trend here reveals the type of company that can afford to spend a lot on advertising since they’re able to acquire consistent revenue from their customers over the course of their lives.

Mortgage – $47.12 per click

Keeping in mind these figures correspond to the number of keywords in the top 10,000 keywords that belong to that category, Mortgage come in third.  Keywords include ‘refinanced’, ‘second’ and ‘mortgages’.

Attorney – $47.07 per click

Continuing the trend of either borrowing or spending large amounts of money for major life activities, ‘attorney’ ranks 4th, with keywords like ‘personal injury attorney’.

Credit – $36.06 per click

It comes as no surprise that ‘credit’ makes it on the list, as well all know credit card companies are constantly looking for new card holders.  ‘home equity line of credit’ is an example of a keyword that would generate ads from this category.

by ELISE

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Facebook is dramatically redesigning its users’ profile pages to create what CEO Mark Zuckerberg says is a “new way to express who you are.”

By.http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com

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The social-networking power has revamped user profiles with a “top story” function that highlights the most relevant tidbits from friends, a Twitter-like news ticker on the right side of the page that offers real-time updates, and larger photos. (Facebook estimates its users post 250 million photos daily.)

The top story function is based on who posted, and the type of news (wedding, birth) shared.

• STORY: Facebook plans massive overhaul

• BLOG: Google+ opens to anyone

“We’ve been experimenting with changes for a long time and think this will ensure that users do not miss out on things they care about,” says Keith Schacht, product manager for Facebook’s News Feed. “It makes the site more alive.”

The new Facebook look should be available to all of its 750 million users in a week or so, Schacht says.

Facebook’s announcement, in advance of what is expected to be a busy day at f8, is the latest broadside in its battle with Google+ for millions of consumers and — indirectly — advertising dollars. Facebook is expected to fold music and next-generation video into its service.

Much is at stake financially. Facebook is expected to rake in $4.27 billion in revenue this year — more than twice the $2 billion it rang up in 2010, according to market researcher eMarketer.

Dueling features in Facebook and Google+ have taken on the feel of a social-networking arms race, with plenty of technological tit-for-tat.

Earlier Tuesday, Google pre-empted Facebook’s news with a slew of new Google+ features. It also said Google+ is now open to everyone, after a nearly three-month closed-trial period.

The most important new feature is improved search.

Meanwhile, Hangouts, the Google+ multiperson video-chat component, will now let users take part in a Hangout chat session using a smartphone or tablet. For now, Hangouts’ new mobile feature is available only on Android devices.

Another new feature, called On Air, will let Google+ users broadcast their hangouts to the public for anyone to watch. In keeping with the Hangout theme, as many as nine other Google+ users can take part in the Hangout On Air.

“We are serious about having the best (social network) service, and we do not plan to slow down,” said Vic Gundotra, the Google senior vice president in charge of Google+. He said 100 changes and features have been added to Google+ since its debut in late June, and as many changes are planned over the next year.

Google+ has more than 10 million members.

By Jon Swartz

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Facebook plans to roll out a major redesign of user profiles at its f8 developer conference this week, Mashable has learned.

Details about the redesign are sparse, but two sources familiar with Facebook’s plans (who have asked to remain anonymous) have told us that the redesign is “major” and will make Facebook profiles nexuses for consuming content.

The profile changes will be part of a wider launch, one that will include launch of a music and media platform.

Here’s what we know so far about the profile redesign:

- The redesigned profiles will be more “sticky,” says one source. One of the goals of the new profiles is to get users to stay on them for longer.

- We already knew Facebook is launching a media platform at f8. However, we’ve also learned that the platform — which will include music and video from partner sites — will display the media content a user is watching or listening to on their profiles. Essentially, when you’re listening to Lady Gaga on Spotify, your friends can see and access that on your Facebook profile. This confirms a recent New York Times report.

- The redesigned profiles are part of a larger push into social ecommerce. We don’t exactly know what that means, but we’ve heard whispers that Facebook intends to give Facebook Credits more prominence. We’ve also heard that a Facebook app store may emerge at f8.

- Facebook’s push into ecommerce may be related Project Spartan, an HTML5-based mobile platform rumored to be launching soon.

Facebook is being tight-lipped about the changes; the company declined to comment on this story. However, more and more pieces of Facebook’s big launch continue to leak out as the excitement builds for f8 (feel free to send us screenshots if you have any) The company is currently under lockdown, trying to fix the final bugs before Thursday’s big launch.

by Ben Parr

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