This gives them a chance to demonstrate their knowledge and, although people often deny it, they generally enjoy talking about themselves. Another tactic is to remove distractions in your presentation that may cause the discussion to go off course. Hopefully, you have someone who can help you find meaning in the numbers or maybe you can get access to a slide deck in which the data was presented in a palatable form.

Designers sometimes have a difficult time wrapping their minds around a spreadsheet full of percentages and decimals, myself included. If you find your meeting happening exactly as you expected, that’s a good sign that you did your homework and are well prepared to defend your design decisions. Often, these constraints cannot be foreseen when creating the original designs, and it is only during implementation that we have to make these adjustments. My client used a different—enterprise—mapping service provider and he had a difficult time reconciling that the image did not look like the maps they would see in the real application.It’s not always the right decision to “roll your own,” so it’s better to explain why using a standard control is better for both the user and the bottom line. Every designer has had to justify designs to non-designers, yet most lack the ability to explain themselves in a way that is compelling and fosters agreement. This is critical because when you’re the one presenting, you may not be able to look away to check your notes and remember everything that went into the design. 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. However, I did learn to pay attention to what he would fixate on and made sure the placeholder copy had no misspellings.

The ability to effectively articulate design decisions is critical to the success of a project, because the most articulate person often wins. As designers, we want to solve problems and achieve goals, we just need to bring that to the forefront so that people are aware of this. A coworker will stop you to ask you about an interaction, which causes you to rethink it on the spot. Whatever the source of the reasoning, always emphasize that your design is intended to help the company achieve its goals. Had I used a better icon to begin with, I could have saved myself from explaining the limitations of my installed icon set each time.As Greever relates his experiences with design meetings, it becomes apparent that many design meetings focus on the wrong things. These support roles are an important consideration for how we design, and factoring it into our decision process is an important point to clarify. Although we would like to think that we designers can create anything under the sun, the reality is that we’re limited by technology. The first is existing data: data we already have available that we can use to help us make decisions now. If you’re not sure, ask them directly what they hope to get out of it or how they see themselves contributing.