uxdesign.cc – User Experience Design — Medium | Ryan Brooks

Win over your clients’/customers’ opinion by showing your process

Remember in grade school, when you were in a math course? The instructor would always tell you to “show your work” on your homework or assignment. This way the instructor can make sure that your process for solving the problem makes sense and if your solution is wrong, they can see exactly where your logic went astray. Somehow as we became adults and entered the professional workforce, we stopped showing our work. In this article, I will tackle two common misconceptions about showing your work, illustrate how showing your work to your clients and stakeholders will ultimately help you create better products, and walk through my method of documenting my work.

Misconception #1: The Secret Sauce

Some people believe that if they show the client or stakeholders the process behind the work that they develop, then the stakeholders will cut them out the process in the future and do the work themselves. The problem with this logic is that it assumes that the stakeholder wants to do the work. THEY DON’T! The stakeholder hired you because they have absolutely no interest in doing your job. They simply want a great product that will meet their business needs at a reasonable cost. They understand that through your educational background, your years of experience and dedication to staying up to date with industry best practices your knowledge is far superior to theirs in the realm of developing great products.

Don’t worry about showing your secret sauce, they couldn’t replicate it if they tried.

Misconception #2: Client’s will take your word for it

Though the stakeholder does understand that you are the expert, they will challenge your process. They’re not challenging your process because they think that you are incompetent. They just want to double check and make sure that you are doing your due diligence, and covering every basis. Remember that in many cases, they are spending thousands of dollars for the product that you are creating, and the success or failure of the product could directly affect the success or failure of their company.

If you take the time to document your process, you will be prepared to answer questions that the client may have, and reassure them that you’ve covered every basis. Your clients will be in awe of the level of thought that you put into your design decisions, and they will appreciate your process and attention to detail even more.

How does documentation help your process?

While there are hundreds of benefits to documenting your process, I’m going to focus on three top benefits that will directly and practically help your practice.

Transfer of knowledge

Have you had to jump into a project that has already started? Maybe you were filling in for someone on maternity leave or you’re a new employee or maybe the project was on hold for a while and you were ramping up and getting back up to speed. Sometimes you’ll look at the work and think to yourself “what the heck was she thinking when she put this button here?!” If there is documentation available, you will be able to read through it and understand that the button is in that location, because of the usability testing results. The usability test document outlines that the target demographic has a common mental model that makes them expect for the button to be in that location, because of the previous software that they use as well. There’s no way that you would know that without reading through the research documentation from the usability test.

Artifacts for future work

Your clients hire you, because of your years of experience and knowledge. As you do research for your product designs, you should be getting nuggets of information and findings that you will be able to lean on and utilize for future products. Your clients will expect for you to have a repository of knowledge about product design and usability. By documenting your process, you can go back to your findings from previous projects and save your client time and resources that would’ve been spent learning something that you should already know.

Portfolio Pieces and Case Studies

When you document your process, it makes it 20 times easier to organize your learnings into case studies, portfolio pieces and published content. Have you ever tried to write a case study for a project that you did and found yourself trying to figure out what exactly you did in the project? If you document exactly what you do while you are doing your project, it’s so much easier to summarize it for the purposes of a case study.

Having case studies and published work available for potential clients to review your work shows that you really know what you are doing and can help generate more business and establish more trust with your clients.

How to document your process?

I come from a school of thought that all design research should be performed using the scientific method. With that said, my research documents follow closely to the format that you would see in a scholarly published article. The components include: Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results/Findings, Discussion, Conclusion, References. (Click here for a free documentation document on Google Drive.)

When preparing to present your research, you can organize a presentation to briefly include the introduction and methods pieces from your documentation and go into deep detail about the findings and implications for design.

Conclusion

Every design decision that you make should be based on research and insights. Whether it be based on research that you’ve read on Medium, a scholarly article published by ACM SIGCHI, or typical user research practices like: user interviews, usability testing, heuristics evaluation, etc. you should be documenting your process and showing your work. You’re clients will be impressed by all of the thought that goes into your designs and will be reassured that your design decisions will perform well.

Please comment below if you found this article helpful, or to share your process of “showing your work.” Also please don’t forget to subscribe!

Show Your Work was originally published in UX Design Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.